Mexico Speeds Up Digital-TV Transition, Will Compete With Grupo Televisa

Mexico will accelerate its transition to digital-television broadcasts, boosting competition against Grupo Televisa SA and freeing up airwaves that can be used for high-speed wireless Internet access.

The transition will begin next year and will be complete in 2015, six years earlier than planned, President Felipe Calderon said today in Mexico City. In a presidential order published today, he told government officials to begin preparing Mexicans for the transition by assuring that digital tuners will be imported and sold at fair prices.

The digital transition will create more openings for new TV networks, Calderon said. That may invite new challenges to Televisa, which gets about 70 percent of Mexico’s broadcast-TV audience, and TV Azteca SA, which has most of the rest.

By 2012, the transition will have freed up airwaves in the 700-megahertz spectrum band, Calderon said. AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless won U.S. spectrum in that same band in a 2008 auction, saying those airwaves were ideal for high-speed mobile communications because of their ability to penetrate walls and cover large areas.

To contact the reporter on this story: Crayton Harrison in Mexico City at tharrison5@bloomberg.net.

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