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| Estrella TV Coming To Chicago |
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| Written by Larz | |||
| Monday, 22 February 2010 16:57 | |||
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Liberman Broadcasting Inc. (aka LBI Media) purchased the WWTO-TV broadcast translator named W40BY from the Trinity Broadcasting Network Inc. for $1.25 million in cash. LBI Media will begin to air Estrella TV, which is their popular Hispanic broadcast network, on W40BY as soon as the deal is approved. This is expected to happen sometime this Spring.
"With the addition of the Chicago station to our (Owned & Operated) stable, LBI Media has achieved yet another significant milestone: Estrella TV will now be seen in each of the top 15 U.S. Hispanic markets," said Lenard Liberman, President & CEO of LBI Media in a statement today. "Hispanics are among fastest growing segment of Chicago's population with nearly two million living in the metropolitan area. We seek to enrich the community with Estrella TV's refreshing news and entertainment, in addition to providing advertisers with a unique platform to engage a coveted demographic." Estrella TV is now in 26 markets nationwide, including 21 of the top 25 Hispanic markets in the US. The Estrella TV lineup features musical-variety, comedy, drama, talk and game shows, as well as daily national news and magazine programs. With its own production studios in Burbank, CA, featuring five sound stages, LBI is producing about 56 hours of original programming weekly for Estrella TV, using talent from the US, Mexico and Latin America. LBI Media also has a library of around 5,000 hours of programming. It seeks to be an alternative to the imported telenovelas and programming shown on Telemundo & Univision owned stations. Just three weeks ago, Liberman Broadcasting Inc. announced the purchase of Denver, CO's KWHD-TV for $6.5 million. The company is looking for even more stations to purchase to grow their network. LBI Media has its own in-house national sales operation which has been repping its own stations for 18 years. The purchase covers ONLY WWTO's broadcast translator W40BY, licensed to Palatine, IL, which broadcasts from the top of Willis Tower. It does not include WWTO itself or any of WWTO's other nine broadcast translator stations. Earlier reports that claimed WWTO-TV was part of the sale turned out to be a mistake. W40BY's airwave range is very limited. Representatives from LBI Media expect to have Chicago's Estrella TV broadcasts picked up by the major cable & satellite television distributors later this year, though. Most paid television service providers will welcome the chance to reach out to a larger Hispanic base. Promoting a new channel that targets that base will help achieve that goal. The Chicago television market is the sixth largest Hispanic market in the US, representing more than 490,000 Latino TV households. The above article corrects & replaces a previous story that had inaccuracies. 
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