Cablemás

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

~ the eulogy ~

For most of its life Cablemás was the second-biggest cable operator in Mexico, and its own beginning is the part nobody wrote down. Both Wikipedias say 1968, the Spanish one adding a precise 14 February in Mexico City, and neither carries a citation for any of it. Televisa's filings decline to help, saying only that the company began as a cable system concessionaire. The oldest hard evidence of the brand I can find is the website: cablemas.com.mx was serving a page in January 1999, about 2.7 kilobytes of it, up to nine kilobytes by that November. Somewhere behind that is a roll-up of regional franchises, with Tijuana as the biggest revenue city, and no founder's name attached.

What it became is documented in detail, because Televisa is listed in New York and had to describe the purchase to the SEC year by year. At the end of 2012, under Televisa's control, Cablemás counted 1,147,007 video subscribers against 567,247 on broadband, plus 302,197 telephone lines. The network ran 19,754 km, 95 percent of it bidirectional, and passed 3.3 million homes under 47 concessions across fourteen Mexican states. The Mexican trade press of the period called it the country's number two pay-TV operator, behind Megacable on subscribers.

The ending was not an event. Televisa had already launched izzi for its Mexico City cable business in late 2014 and spent the following years moving everything onto that name, but Cablemás kept its own portal running on a different platform for another five years. Then, in some week between 19 October and 12 November 2019, the portal was replaced. What went up in its place was a single banner with the Cablemás logo over the instruction to visit the website for your city of origin, above a table of roughly seventy cities pointing at izzi.mx and twenty-one more pointing at wizz.mx. That page stayed up into mid-2020. There was no press release, and the Mexican trade press, which had covered every stage of the acquisition, did not mark the day the name stopped.

~ the dossier ~

~ the staircase ~

The acquisition is worth laying out because of how slowly it was done. In November 2006 Televisa put US$258 million into notes convertible into 99.99 percent of Alvafig, the holding company that owned a 49 percent voting stake in Cablemás. The antitrust commission cleared that 49 percent in July 2007 on condition that access to Televisa's content stayed non-discriminatory, and years later it fined Televisa for breaching exactly that. In May 2008 the notes were converted and Televisa began consolidating Cablemás in its accounts from June. In February 2009 Alvafig's holding reached 58.3 percent of the capital. In November 2010 Televisa prepaid US$183 million of Cablemás debt.

Then on 1 April 2011 it agreed to buy the remaining 41.7 percent from a minority shareholder whose name appears in none of the filings I could read, for about 4,700 million pesos, roughly US$397 million. On 29 April the shareholders approved merging Cablemás, S.A. de C.V. into Televisa outright, with Televisa surviving and 24.8 million CPOs issued. Four and a half years from a convertible note to a dissolved legal entity, and then another eight before the name came off the bills.

~ the city list ~

I want to sit with that closing page for a moment, because it is a strange artifact. A cable company's website is normally a shop: packages, channel lineups, a speed test, a place to pay your bill. What replaced it was a directory. Acapulco, Cancún, Mérida, Tijuana, Mexicali, Ciudad Juárez and sixty-odd others on one side under izzi; Chetumal, Cozumel, Isla Mujeres, Tulum and seventeen more on the other under wizz. The whole national footprint of the company, reduced to a lookup table whose only function was to send you somewhere else.

Mexican cable is a long way from anything I have used, and the complaint literature is where it is most recognizable. The Spanish Wikipedia cites a run of regional outlets on billing disputes and consumer-protection cases, and there is an interview years later in a Tijuana weekly with a customer comparing an izzi bill unfavorably against the Cablemás one it replaced. That is what a regional cable operator usually leaves behind. Nobody is nostalgic for Cablemás, but people kept using it as the yardstick for how much worse the thing that replaced it was.

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