Blim TV

» see blim.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Mexican telenovelas were dubbed into Turkish and ran on Turkish television in the early nineties, which is as close as anyone in my house ever got to Televisa. Twenty years later the traffic reversed and it was Turkish series being dubbed into Spanish for Latin American afternoons, which is a rare case of two countries taking turns being each other's imported melodrama. Blim sat in the middle of all that and I still never opened it, because it was a Spanish-language subscription sold into markets I do not live in.

It launched on 22 February 2016 out of Mexico City at 109 pesos a month, roughly $5.65, with a free trial in the first month, which was Netflix's shape copied closely enough to be a statement of intent. Behind it was Televisa's own production library, decades of it, plus licensed film from Disney, Paramount, MGM and the BBC. It reached 18 countries across Latin America and the Caribbean.

The problem showed up early and never went away. Televisa's shows were already on free broadcast television across Mexico, and the older catalog was scattered across cable and YouTube in pieces. Asking people to pay monthly for a library they associated with free-to-air is a hard sell in any country. By 2018 Netflix held over 80 percent of Mexican streaming and Blim had about 2.7 percent, and by 2022 that had slid to roughly 1.6.

On 3 September 2019 the service relaunched as Blim TV and added around thirty live channels, Las Estrellas and Canal 5 among them. That is a cable package wearing a streaming app, and it read as an admission that the on-demand pitch had not worked. The subscriber share kept falling anyway.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the merger that ended it ~

Televisa and Univision announced their content merger in April 2021 and closed it in January 2022. The following month TelevisaUnivision announced ViX, a single Spanish-language platform for both sides of the border, with a free ad-supported tier and a paid one above it. Blim and Univision's PrendeTV were both slated to disappear into it.

ViX launched in March 2022 and the migration ran through the rest of the year. Blim TV stayed up in a diminished state while subscribers were moved across, and on 31 March 2023 it closed for good, with everything it held becoming part of the ViX catalog. There was no dramatic ending and no fight over it. The company simply had two streaming services and needed one.

~ what it proved ~

Blim is the clearest demonstration in Latin America that owning the content does not get you the habit. Televisa had the library, the studios, the stars and the distribution relationships in eighteen countries, and it still could not persuade people to open its app instead of the one they already had open. The library was necessary and it was not close to sufficient.

The sequel worked, which is what makes this an interesting grave rather than a simple failure. ViX is TelevisaUnivision's main platform now and a serious business, built on a free tier and a merged catalog and the whole Spanish-speaking market rather than one country. Blim was the seven-year tuition payment for learning what the second attempt needed to be.

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