Media

Yankee Group announced that the tween market is the next new growth opportunity for wireless carriers. The tween market, defined as 8- to 12-year-olds, has 5.3 million wireless users, accounting for 2.6% of all wireless subscribers. Amongst tweens, 27% have cell phones—a penetration rate that is almost one-third that of the overall wireless industry average as of year-end 2005.

Fox Sports en Español has acquired the exclusive U.S. Spanish-language television rights to the 57th Caribbean World Series of baseball, to be held next month in Venezuela. The four-team, six-day tournament, to be televised for the eighth consecutive year on Fox Sports en Español, will kick off Thursday, February 2 at 4:30 p.m. ET/1:30 p.m. PT with a match-up between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.

A study by Sharpe Partners, an award-winning interactive marketing agency, revealed that 89% of adult Internet users in America share content with others via email. Sharpe Partners’ study on viral marketing also found that 63 % of the respondents share content at least once a week, with 25% sharing daily or almost daily, and as many as 75% of the respondents forward this content to up to six other recipients.

ESPN, Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association have reached an agreement that makes ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPN Syndication the exclusive domestic English-language providers of the inaugural World Baseball Classic when it is held in March. ESPN Deportes, ESPN’s Spanish-language network in the U.S., will be the only network to televise all 39 games of the inaugural Classic.

ImpreMedia, LLC announced the acquisition of La Prensa, Central Florida’s leading Spanish language newspaper. The acquisition was made with proceeds of an $82.5 million credit facility with Goldman Sachs Specialty Lending Group, L.P. This is the fifth company acquired by ImpreMedia, following only one month after its acquisition of El Mensajero in the San Francisco Bay area.

Fox Pan American Sports today announced it has finalized a licensing agreement with Cuatro Media, Inc. (Cuatro Media), a developer of Spanish-language media content, to produce and distribute a monthly magazine titled Fox Sports en Español in the United States. Available in New York, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, Dallas and Houston through Hispanic newspapers, and nationally via paid subscription, the high-quality, saddle-stitched, full-color Spanish-language sports magazine is scheduled to debut March 23, 2006.

During a press conference held at NATPE, Telemundo President, Don Browne, alongside Patricio Wills and Marcos Santana, heads of Production and Program Development, respectively, boasted about Telemundo’s success in the international market and announced the Spanish-language network is, in fact, the second-largest producer of Spanish-language telenovelas in the world; beating giants like Brazil’s Globo and Venezuela’s Venevision.

Since the Univision Network joined the NTI in December 2005 – a historic step that made it possible for Univision to be measured alongside its primary competitors, the major English-language broadcast networks – data illustrates that Univision averages approximately 3.5 million viewers in primetime every night, a larger average audience than that of the WB and UPN networks.