In the contentious 2020 U.S. elections, there is little doubt Hispanic Americans will play an outsized role both as a large voting bloc and as the center of a broader debate about the future of the country and immigration.

“The 2020 election is going to really be a turning point for the Latino community in this country,” NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises senior vice president of digital media Romina Rosado said.

Some of this is just plain arithmetic. “Major brands now recognize that if you are trying to sell a product to an American under the age of 40, you absolutely have to have a Hispanic strategy because it is such a young population with a median age of 28,” Rosado said. “And on the political side, it is the same. If you are a candidate and you want to reach people under the age of 40, you absolutely have to speak to the Hispanic audience, because there are 60 million of them and 50,000 Hispanics turn 18 every single month.”

Univision Digital senior political editor Carlos Chirinos agreed. “It is well-known that Hispanics are an important minority in the U.S. and their political clout is growing bigger with every election,” he said, making it more important than ever to “treat the news with a Hispanic angle.”

According to the Pew Research Center, Hispanic turnout reached a record level of 11.7 million voters in 2018, more than double the 5.6 million who voted in 2006 and triple the 2.9 million who turned out for the 1990 election.

Pew also projects Hispanics will be the largest ethnic group among voters in 2020, comprising 13% of the electorate, nearly double the 7% share they had in 2000.

To better understand how the growing Hispanic population impacts 2020 election coverage, Multichannel News decided to focus on the two major Spanish-language broadcast networks — Univision and Telemundo — and on how these networks are deploying new technologies, developing additional programming, building new facilities and covering the issues in what promises to be a landmark election.

RELATED:Next-Gen News Facility Is Here

Executives at both networks said the growing importance of Hispanics has already translated into unprecedented access to top political figures.

“We had the first exclusive interview with President Trump in Spanish-language media,” Luis Fernández, Telemundo executive vice president of network news, said. “We had the first exclusive interview with former VP Joe Biden when he entered the race. And Telemundo had the first Democratic debate with NBC News and MSNBC. It was the first time in television history that a Latino network broadcast the first debate.”

Meanwhile, major Hispanic news outlets are seeing notable audience growth in their news coverage and are pouring unprecedented resources into their coverage of U.S. politics and the 2020 elections.

Univision cited Nielsen data showing Noticiero Univision averaging 1.6 million total viewers so far in the 2019-20 season. The newscast has seen a notable uptick of 8% among adults 18-49 and a 11% jump in the 25-54 demo, compared to the same period at the start of last season, Univision reported.

Similarly, Sunday-morning public affairs program Al Punto is up 22% among all viewers, 34% in the the 18-49 demo and 15% among adults 25-54 in the first two weeks of the 2019-20 season.

Such ratings increases are unusual in an off election year like 2019, but they reflect the current, highly politicized election cycle. The two-night Democratic presidential debates in Miami in late June on Telemundo, NBC News and MSNBC drew a total of 15.3 million viewers for night one — more than any primary debate in the 2008 or 2012 election cycles — and another 9 million viewers on the second night.

Building for 2020

Next year, news tech is likely to play an outsized role as Hispanic broadcast networks use the large investments they’ve made to expand their coverage.

Lourdes Torres, senior vice president of political coverage and special projects at Univision, said the network will upgrade its Election Night set and use augmented reality technologies to better present the results and data.

“Our set designed for Election Night 2020 will put a premium on simplifying results,” Torres said. “We will make extensive use of large video monitors, touch screens and augmented reality.”

The impact of big tech investments on election coverage can also be seen at the Telemundo Center. Since it went live in the second quarter of 2019, the Miami facility has already played a major role in improving Telemundo’s election coverage, most notably providing a new set for the June 2019 Democratic debates.

The new facility allowed Telemundo to launch a noon newscast and made it much easier and cheaper to produce new TV and digital programming, Fernández and others said.

With more than 500,000 square feet of space, the Telemundo Center features 13 studios and five production control rooms to handle more than 4,000 hours of original production per year for sports, news, entertainment, scripted drama and digital.

The center is also built around groundbreaking new technologies that will allow the Telemundo news division to be much more flexible, efficient and productive in the creation of new content for both broadcast and digital.

An important feature is that the center is an all-internet protocol facility. IP systems have long been used to transport video and data over the public internet, but all-IP infrastructures are relatively new in the television industry. The new CNN headquarters at New York’s Hudson Yards and the Telemundo Center are the two notable pioneering examples of networks going all-IP within the last two years.

“News and elections are always some of the most challenging things [our tech teams] have to support because the very nature of what they have to do is very dynamic,” Jeff Mayzurk, senior vice president of operations and technology for NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises, said of the decision to go all-IP. “It changes all the time with breaking news.”

With the new IP platform, though, the studios and infrastructure can quickly be reconfigured to handle new programs, digital products or very complex events like the June Democratic presidential debate, which required eight translators to handle the live translation from English to Spanish.

“It was a very complex event, but we were able to expand support for it with relative ease,” Mayzurk said.

The new infrastructure also lets TV and digital news teams work side by side in the same newsroom, using the same technologies. This melding of TV and digital to create more news content will be particularly important for the 2020 elections, Telemundo executives said, because it will allow them to react more quickly to an already sped-up news cycle.

No More Silos

“How you integrate [the TV and digital newsrooms] is the million dollar question for all media, not just here in the U.S.,” given the need to quickly deliver content to more devices, Telemundo’s Fernández said.

The fact that Latinos are much younger than the general population means “the people we are serving have grown up on these digital platforms,” Rosado said. “We have to create platforms for where our audience is.”

Univision executives agreed. Chirinos said the network has “a dedicated digital news team for the political coverage feeding our website 24/7 [that follows] the hectic political dynamic that characterizes the Trump administration” and “our digital platform has been conceived on a mobile-first concept.”

“Our multiplatform offerings give us the flexibility to cover candidates from broadcast to digital one minute to the next,” added Univision’s Torres.

Telemundo’s Rosado noted the network’s new production facility is helping to launch a number of digital offerings.

“We have received a grant from YouTube to create a newscast for YouTube,” she said. Also, starting in October, subscription video-on-demand service Quibi said it would be doing a newscast with Telemundo, joining the BBC and NBC News in producing daily newscasts for the platform in the run-up to its 2020 launch, Rosado said.

“The economics of creating video at scale has always been the impossible dream in digital,” Rosado said. “The economics are just not there for anyone trying to produce high-quality video and make money. But this facility changes that. We can produce video at scale and shoot pretty much anywhere in the building.”

That will allow them to better cover issues important for Hispanics.

Next-Gen News Facility Is Here

TO SEE HOW new technology will affect TV coverage of the 2020 elections, look at the new Telemundo Center in Miami.

The facility’s design goal was to bring all the company’s original production units under one roof “to get the collaborative benefit of having the various production teams side by side,” NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises senior vice president of operations and technology Jeff Mayzurk said.

Over a three-year planning and construction process, Mayzurk’s teams quickly realized that traditional broadcast and production technologies wouldn’t help Telemundo achieve its goals.

“The scale of this facility would have been impossible in an SDI world,” said Mayzurk, referring to the Serial Digital Interface (SDI) standard that has long been used to move video within broadcast facilities.

To avoid that problem, Mayzurk and his team decided to go all-internet protocol, which allowed them to connect all the devices, sets, cameras and other technologies to one network. This IP network currently has nearly 10,000 Ethernet ports and can handle 150,000 multicast flows, providing enormous flexibility to add new equipment or reconfigure existing studios, cameras or other devices.

The facility also relies on cloud-based production technologies, which can be easily expanded or reconfigured, and cutting-edge automation to more easily revamp sets and production studios to add new programs.

The result is a game-changer for creating news content. “We can maintain a very high level of quality but at a lower cost point,” Mayzurk said. “A lot of news organizations are struggling with the fact that they have to produce more content and increase coverage but budgets aren’t growing. This allows us to do much more with less.”

Beyond the Border

Efforts to expand coverage of issues that matter to Hispanics in the runup to the 2020 elections are particularly important because of the way the group is often either portrayed or — just as problematically — ignored.

“What we are seeing in research is that if you are a Latino and you are looking at the way you are being represented in the mainstream media, what you are usually seeing is the poor person dying at the border,” Telemundo's Rosado said. “We are not really being portrayed in a way that is truly representative of what Latinos in this country do, how they come in different hues and different background and how they have been woven into the fabric of this country for generations.”

Univision’s Torres agreed. “It is a dynamic and growing community with a variety of ethnic, cultural and general backgrounds that are not monolithic,” she said, making it important to dive in “beyond the headlines.”

Torres and others also stressed that Hispanic broadcast networks can bring a deeper and more nuanced perspective to issues like immigration.

“We have people who have been covering immigration for a very long time,” Rosado noted. “But sometimes in the mainstream media, it is an issue that some people have woken up to when the president started tweeting about it. So there is a lack of understanding.”

“Immigration is so important for us that we do have it as a section, apart from politics,” said Chirinos at Univision. “The subject blends in the political debate because it has become a major issue for the Trump administration and is permeating the whole campaign.”

That means, he continued, “we cover the politics of immigration as well as the policy of it. … We keep tabs on the changing rules … We have a section dedicated to answer questions about immigration issues, which is one of the most read, and also a weekly podcast with our in-house experts talking about the issue.”

A deeper dive into the issues also reveals the complexity of Hispanic views on subjects like immigration. “Through our Univision News polling we have found and continue to find that Latinos are not monolithic on [immigration] and we work diligently to reflect that in our news coverage,” Torres at Univision said.

“We literally report things down the middle because when you look at the data the attitudes of Hispanics towards immigration are mixed,” Telemundo’s Rosado added. “You see second, third and even fourth generation Hispanics who have lived in this country for a long time saying, ‘I don’t want any more immigration.’ ”

NEW YORK — Spanish-language television is alive and well, Telemundo president Luis Silberwasser declared at the Hspanic Television Summit here Oct. 22.

“You can see the demand for Spanish-language television is pretty significant,” he told interviewer and Noticiero Telemundoco-anchor María Celeste Arrarás during a session at Park Central Hotel in Manhattan.

Silberwasser added, however, that the reduction in immigration from Spanish-speaking countries has had an effect.

“Clearly there is a shift going on,” he said. “But it has opened also the door, for the number of bilinguals are growing. So for us it’s an opportunity."

He attributed Telemundo’s recent ratings success to original content and innovation, which help them reach the evolving Hispanic audience, including millennials.

For example, the network has launched “Telemundo Súper Series,” shows that differ from traditional telenovelas in that they have fewer episodes, higher-end production and pumped-up action. Súper series El Señor de los Cielos recently launched its second season and, to help audience members catch up, the network released a comic book summarizing season one as well as a digital push preceding the premiere.

“When you try to do something different at a high-quality level, I think Telemundo tends to win," Silberwasser said, "and I think the audience is able to see a shift in the marketplace right now."

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

Arizona will open the 2015 playoffs against Carolina on Saturday afternoon in ESPN's first-ever NFL postseason telecast.

The battle in Charlotte's Bank of America Stadium also marks the kickoff of the most expansive NFL playoff coverage in Spanish, as ESPN Deportes will jump in with its own presentation of the Cardinals-Panthers. Later that night, NBCUniversal’s mun 2 will televise the Baltimore Ravens-Pittsburgh Steelers matchup, which also will air on NBC.

On Sunday, Fox Deportes, alongside Fox Broadcast, will showcase the Detroit Lions against the Dallas Cowboys. 

Last season, Fox Deportes became the first Spanish-language network in the U.S. to televise the NFL’s title tilt. This year that distinction falls to Comcast’s programming unit, as mun2 will culminate its transformation to NBC Universo on Feb. 1, Super Bowl Sunday.

Left unanswered:  Which network will televise Super Bowl L in Spanish. CBS will air the golden anniversary of the NFL’s Big Game from Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif. next year. However, CBS doesn’t have a Spanish-language outlet.

All of the league’s extant parties expressed interest in securing the rights to the contest. However, talks have yet to materialize. “We have not had discussions with the NFL; we expect them to take place soon,” said Carlos Sanchez, executive vice president and general manager of Fox Deportes.

Although the NFL is growing among Latinos – a 2013 ESPN Deportes Sports poll found that 60% of all Hispanics are NFL fans, more than boxing, NBA and MLB, and the game trails only soccer and Olympics overall. Moreover, among U.S.-born Hispanics, the NFL is the most popular sport.   

Despite such sentiment, and this year’s expanded postseason, the NFL, which has set a goal of raising its revenue base to $25 billion, from $10 billion today, by 2027, has not fully capitalized in this arena. ESPN Deportes’ coverage of Monday Night Football aside, there are only a handful of other regular-season games in Spanish-language play.

Could Spanish-language media leader Univision’s cable networks Galavision, or its dedicated sports network, Univision Deportes, be in the mix for an NFL package and/or Super Bowl L?

The league declined comment about its Spanish-language television game plan.

As for the 2015 postseason, the networks are sanguine about the ratings and commercial prospects.

*ESPN Deportes.  The Carolina-Arizona affair marks the apex of a long run with NFL that began before the network’s full-time bow. Fred Rolon, vice president of programming and business, noted that the service in 2001 -- when ESPN held the rights to the Sunday Night Football package -- made the games available in Spanish through ad hoc telecasts that were carried by Comcast and Time Warner Cable. ESPN Deportes launched as a 24/7 network in 2004.

The 2014 Monday Night Football schedule scored as ESPN Deportes’ most-watched and highest-rated season on record. During the recently completed campaign, the service averaged 59,000 Hispanic households and 85,000 of those viewers, up 31% and 25%, respectively, from 45,000 and 68,000 in 2013. Its coverage was highlighted by the 100, 000 Hispanic households and 128,000 watchers for the Oct. 27 game between Washington-Dallas, which stands as the second-most-watched MNF telecast behind Chicago Dallas on Dec. 9, 2013.

“The NFL continues to build,” said Rolon. “This was ESPN Deportes’ most successful season so far with Monday Night Football and the Wild Card is an exclamation point for us.”

Rolon said there was strong interest in the game on Madison Avenue and great crossover with ESPN. He said a number of marketers have taken “a total market position” with a presence in both the Spanish- and English language telecasts of the contest.

That roster includes General Motors, Mars, Pepsi, P&G, Anheuser-Busch and McDonald's, according to ESPN officials.  

Fox Deportes. Now in the second of two-year deal, Fox Deportes has a quartet of playoff telecasts on tap: its Wild Card coverage of Detroit-Dallas on Jan. 4, Divisional round matchups hosted by Seattle and Green Bay on  Jan. 10 and 11, as well as the NFC Championship game on Jan. 18.

Last Feb. 2, Fox Deportes made history, when it became the first Spanish-language channel in the U.S. to air the NFL championship game.

Super Bowl XLVIII played big, setting a new record with an average audience of 561,000 total viewers to become the most-watched non-soccer sports event in Spanish cable history. Despite Seattle’s 43-8 shellacking of Denver, viewership built throughout the game and peaked at 794,000 total viewers and 568,000 adults 18-49 during the second half.  

“The first year proved to be very successful,” said Sanchez. “It was much better than we expected.”

The network averaged 49,000 total viewers with its Thanksgiving Day coverage of Philadelphia’s throttling of Dallas on Thanksgiving. Officials said the average audience performance was eight times greater than its competitors and was six times larger among Latinos 18 to 49.

Sanchez is confident Fox Deportes’ 2015 postseason schedule, featuring studio talent at game-site locales and telecasts highlighting Latino players and coaches that viewers can identify with, will perform well, even without the Super Bowl paydirt.  

“The NFL is growing sports among Latinos. We want to be involved with the league and keep our leadership position among viewers,” he said.

NBC Universo. With the Sept. 28 Hispanic Heritage Game between New Orleans and Dallas and the Thanksgiving night matchup of Seatlle-San Francisco in the books, mun 2 will begin putting the money end of its one-year primetime deal with the NFL in play on Saturday night. Mirroring NBC’s playoff schedule, the 40 million subscriber mun2 will televise the Ravens-Steelers encounter on Jan. 3, the Divisional game hosted by the New England Patriots on Jan. 10 and Super Bowl XLIX from Glendale, Ariz. on Feb. 1, when the service will officially morph into NBC Universo.   

Network president Rubén Mendiola, who is overseeing the change to a modern, general-entertainment cable channel for Latinos that will showcase FIFA, NASCAR and other sports action, said the programmer is “super-focused on the Super Bowl. This is the biggest transformation for the network. All of operations are moving to Miami and the changeover will culminate with Super Bowl,” he said, expressing thanks for the NFL assist the service is receiving from NBC Sports. “Their support has been tremendous. They are helping us with the look of our telecasts and their story-telling approach to sports.”

Mendiola said “it’s been very exciting to see how the market is reacting” to the shift to NBC Universo.

That includes media buyers who are supporting the network’s NFL slate. Mike Rosen, executive vice president of advertising sales for NBCUniversal Hispanic Group, said the team packaged the regular season, postseason Super Bowl together.

Those efforts have yielded “a mix of traditional advertisers that look to reach Hispanic viewers, as well as some new ones,” said Rosen. “The NFL postseason and Super Bowl will hopefully open more doors for NBC Universo going forward.”

Rosen wouldn’t disclose the sell-through level or identify the advertisers viewers will see in NBC Universo’s Super Bowl telecast. He did say the sales have “exceeded our expectations and there were high expectations.”

He said NBC Universo will deliver a bonus audience with its culturally relevant presentation of the title game:  “We hope the telecast will extend the reach of what will hopefully be another record audience with the Super Bowl.”