Fusion TV

» see fusion.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

the first time i heard the fusion tv name was in 2016, when univision announced it was folding gizmodo media group into a fusion media umbrella that also swept in the onion. i was reading gizmodo daily then on a work coffee break, and the news read like an american media puzzle piece i had no visibility into. the cable channel itself i never watched. it did not carry in turkey and the streaming site was not translated for us.

fusion tv launched on 28 october 2013 as a joint venture between disney's abc news and univision communications. the pitch was straightforward on paper. english speaking millennial viewers with a hispanic tilt would want a news channel that treated them as first-language english users but with hispanic culture as a default, not a curiosity. the initial launch reached about twenty million us homes with a stated five year target of sixty million. the mix was news through the day and satire like no, you shut up! in prime time.

disney sold its half of the channel to univision on 21 april 2016 for a figure around one hundred and twenty million dollars, based on public estimates at the time. univision then merged fusion tv with the gizmodo media group properties it had bought out of gawker's bankruptcy that summer. the fusion tv channel and the fusion media group web sites ran on separate tracks after that, with only the brand and a shared editorial umbrella joining them.

~ the record ~

~ the pitch ~

fusion was pitched to advertisers as a millennial second-screen play. mtv was aging out of the eighteen to thirty four demo. cnn and msnbc were leaning older. univision had the biggest spanish language footprint in the us but no english-language brand. abc had abc news but nothing millennial-shaped inside the disney portfolio. the two together were supposed to fill the gap for us hispanic millennials who spoke english at home and did not want their news read at them by a sixty year old anchor.

the on-air lineup mixed jorge ramos style hard-news interviews with the satirical no, you shut up! puppet show and lifestyle blocks. the design was mtv news for a hispanic english demo. it never really broke out. carriage grew slowly and ratings stayed under measurement thresholds. the channel became one more slot inside the cable bundle that nobody could name from memory.

~ the fall ~

by 2017 fusion had gone through multiple format shifts, moving away from prime time satire and into hard news. layoffs ran through the fusion media group web side that same year. cable ratings on the linear channel stayed well below the level that would justify the affiliate fees univision was collecting. dish network dropped the channel in january 2020 and spectrum plus charter followed in september 2020, cutting the reach in half over one calendar year.

univision itself was pivoting away from the english-language millennial project. the televisa-univision merger was on the table, planned as a spanish-language streaming push targeting the whole americas region. english-language millennials with a hispanic tilt were not the target demographic for a spanish-first company merging with a mexico-based studio. by mid 2021 fusion tv was a stripped-down news feed with almost no original programming left.

~ the postmortem ~

univision announced the shutdown in the last week of 2021 and pulled the channel off the air on 31 december that year. no big farewell and no montage of past hosts on the way out. no send-off statement from a founding executive. the fusion media group web brands had already been sold off in pieces earlier in the decade. the fusion tv shutdown was the last piece of the 2013 abc-univision experiment to formally disappear from the market.

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