Sometimes the big just keep getting bigger. This has traditionally been the case with Univision and their latest online moves are pretty big. The company already ranks as the top U.S. Hispanic property, almost double the users of the closest competitor.

Granted, Univision’s audience was slightly inflated during the month these figures were measured since their site began streaming World Cup videos on June 11. Therefore their current traffic might be closer to 2.5 million, a figure I’ve seen in some industry presentations. Regardless Univision is clearly in the lead and it will likely extend this position given a number of recent announcements:

• September 20: Univision launched 72 new local and mobile sites in top 20 Hispanic markets. Including this one for its owned and operated Miami station.
• September 23: Univision and the NFL announced the launch of a worldwide site (www.NFL.com/espanol) for Hispanic and Mexican NFL fans.
• October 7: Univision launched a new music site, Musica.Unvision.com.
• October 12: Univision and NBA announce a partnership for a new co-branded site with league content on Univision Interactive Media’s online platform.
• October 18: Univision anounces that VEVO’s music video catalog will be added to Musica.Unvision.com.

Most importantly, and probably instrumental in closing these parnterships, a significant deal between Univision and Televisa was realized whereby online content rights from the latter will finally extend to the former. As I explored in early 2009, Univision’s lack of these rights resulted in a large amount of pirated Televisa material on YouTube, something that was eventually policed during the ensuing year, probably as a prelude to this deal.

With the addition of NFL, NBA, Televisa and new music content, it will be interesting to see how much Univision’s traffic grows. Since Univision already reaches over 75% of the online Hispanic audience the effect might be greater in terms of engagement rather than unique users; popular long-form telenovela videos should considerably raise the time on site for their users. Video traffic also sell at higher CPMs and has strong growth potential- online video advertising grew over 31% during the first half of 2010 as compared to 2009.

At the 2009 Horowitz Media Conference a speaker declared that Hispanic online video was a wide open opportunity. It seems to me that with Univision’s announcements this sector will be catching on fire during the next year, and will likely attract a lot of attention and further investment, both in the form of advertising and new ventures, something that should be beneficial not just to Univision but to all participants in the online Hispanic market.

Yesterday a deal was announced between Univision and YouTube whereby the U.S. Hispanic network would bring a “hefty stable of short- and long-form programming to YouTube.” While this is “the first time any Univision programming is available on the Web outside of its own properties” a great deal of the network’s programming, particularly material from Televisa, has been illegally posted on YouTube. Back in February TubeMogul estimated that this content drawing was over double any other U.S. network.

Number of views of clips from the 10 most-pirated shows on each major network
Univision: 583,750,247*
Fox: 289,074,325
ABC: 260,299,418
CBS: 127,334,729
NBC: 120,890,835
Source: TubeMogul
*Includes Televisa content pirated from El Canal de las Estrellas

As I mentioned in a posting in February, Univision’s view count is mostly attributable to Televisa content, specifically material copied from El Canal de las Estrellas where their telenovelas air months ahead of Univision. Similar to how different regional premieres have encouraged piracy in the movie industry, pirated telenovela clips have flooded YouTube to the delight of thousands of fans.

The piracy seems to have gone on unabated in part because Televisa and Univsion are still wrangling over the digital broadcast rights of these telenovelas. This protracted battle is the focus of an excellent article today in Ad Age.

…perhaps because of the animus involved, Televisa simply ignored the fact that fans were uploading its telenovelas to YouTube… Televisa has become more aggressive about policing YouTube over the past year… The number of pirated clips of Televisa-produced Univision shows are down 53% since February, according to TubeMogul.

Even if the number of clips has been cut in half, plenty of Televisa’s content can still be seen on YouTube, something that would never be permitted by a Hollywood studio for an equivalent U.S. television series. A quick search of just recent Televisa telenovelas will yield dozens of clips that have each garnered over 100,000 views. Just the telenovela Sortilegio, which premiered in October on Univision, has garnered over 70 million views on YouTube. What’s worse, I also found a shady website called SortilegioTV.com where full episodes can be streamed for free, although a disclaimer below stipulates:

The streaming videos that has been found here are hosted by third party. Any copyrighted videos is a property of the original copyright holder. Therefore any violations, the owner of the blog is not liable.

While this is chaotic, at least it indicates that there is a tremendous amount of demand for Hispanic content online. Obviously, Univision’s decision to launch this new YouTube channel is an effort to consolidate its presence in this space, with or without Televisa telenovelas. In the meantime, perhaps Televisa can afford to let its content be pirated in YouTube since it probably won’t affect its business interests in Mexico where the company recently launched its own video portal, Tvolucion, similar in style and content to Hulu. Tvolucion seems to fullfill the wish of every telenovela fan, but only if they’re in Mexico. ‘Foreign’ viewers are notified that the material is not available in their market, although Tvolucion is “working on offering their catalog to a greater number of regions.” They are then invited to let Televisa know where they’re based.

It’s possible that Televisa is angling to have some sort of presence online in the U.S. market, thus bypassing their broadcast partner Univision and becoming a direct competitor within the online space. However it’s more probable that the two companies will compromise on an arrangement whereby Univision will gain the online rights for the telenovelas, with certain restrictions or windows in place, just as Hulu and Netflix have arranged with other content producers.

In any case this does makes me realize that eventually the U.S. Hispanic online market will be much more complex than what is currently seen in traditional media.