Univision also has enjoyed similar dominance in ad revenue. However, Telemundo increased its total revenue by about one-third over last year and was able to charge about 7 percent more for its shows compared with 2003, NBC Universal said, indicating that Telemundo has made some inroads into Univision's near hegemony.
Though Telemundo contributes a thin slice to its parent's overall revenue, NBC Universal Chairman Bob Wright said at General Electric's July 22 board meeting that the unit was a growth engine for the company, anticipating annual increases of $100 million in revenue over the next few years. Telemundo accounted for nearly $300 million of NBC Universal's $4.5 billion in first-half 2004 revenue, up about 10 percent from the first half of 2003, McNamara said. Commercials on the telenovelas account for nearly 60 percent of Telemundo's total revenue.
Telemundo's president, James M. McNamara, says embracing the Mexican dialect is good business.
(Damian Dovarganes -- AP)
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At Univision, about half of the network's telenovelas are imported, produced by Televisa, the Mexican television giant, Venevision in Venezuela, and others. (Televisa executive Emilio Azcarraga Milmo is regarded by many as the father of accent-neutral Mexican television Spanish, which he began advocating more than two decades ago.) The other half is produced by Univision. Univision said it encourages its actors to speak in a way that will be understood by all viewers and provides coaching on an case-by-case basis, but employs no coaching program, though Televisa and other producers do. Accent-scrubbing can have its downside, Univision said.
Univision appreciates "that our talent should maintain the essence of who they are, and not abandon their valuable uniqueness and individual culture and heritage they bring to their role at Univision," Univision President Ray Rodriguez said via e-mail.
Agreed, said Fabio Lopez de la Roche, a professor at Colombia's Universidad Nacional, who criticized Telemundo in an April article in a Bogota newspaper, saying: "In the search for massive audiences and for a Hispanic public which is highly fragmented in their identities, these soaps seem diluted and deprived of socio-cultural representation."
Both Telemundo and Univision hope to ride the trend toward Spanish-language television programming among Spanish-speakers. Ten years ago, Spanish-speakers split their television time 60-40, watching more English television than Spanish, according to Nielsen. Those numbers hit 50-50 in 2003. Now, Spanish-speakers spend 56 percent of their viewing time with Spanish-language shows and 44 percent with English-language programs, the research shows.
"The thing I cannot tolerate, and it's happened to us in the past, we've put on a telenovela that creatively is great but you do your research and viewers say it's so difficult to understand because they're speaking so fast, or that the accent is off-putting," McNamara said.
At a recent NBC party in Los Angeles, McNamara was explaining the accent-coaching when he called over Jorge Enrique Abello, star of the network's upcoming telenovela, "Anita: No Te Rajes!" (Translated, "Anita: Don't Crack!")
In Spanish, McNamara told Abello that he was discussing diccion.
"Ah," the actor replied, in lightly accented English, "my diction is perfect!"
