Televisa Chief Emilio Azcarraga Out as CEO

Mexico's top network has seen broadcast ad revenue steadily decline in the age of Netflix.
Emilio Azcarraga, the longtime head honcho of Mexican media giant Televisa, is stepping down as CEO but will remain executive chairman of the board.

Bernardo Gomez and Alfonso de Angoitia, close friends and colleagues of Azcarraga, will take over as co-chief executives effective Jan. 1.

Famous for its melodramatic telenovelas, Televisa has been losing many of its young viewers to streamer Netflix and other popular online platforms. In a move to compete with the Netflixes of the world, Televisa in 2016 launched its own streaming service called Blim. But according to research firm The Competitive Intelligence Unit, Blim corners only 7 percent of Mexico's SVOD market, compared to Netflix's 64 percent.

Televisa, a Univision partner, supplies the U.S. Spanish-language broadcaster with a bulk of its primetime content. In response to the growing competition from both traditional and emerging platforms, earlier this year Univision and Televisa unified their content development and production efforts under chief content office Isaac Lee.
But programming struggles apparently have continued. Though Televisa still receives a healthy chunk of revenue from its program license agreement with Univision, about 60 percent of the Mexican company's income now comes from non-content operations, such as its telecom services.

In a Televisa statement Azcarraga said, "Our industry is undergoing a massive transformation, presenting us with big challenges, but even bigger opportunities."

Gomez and De Angoitia, currently executive vps at Televisa, have been working alongside Azcarraga since the late 1990s. Azcarraga took the reins of Televisa after his father, Emilio "El Tigre" Azcarraga, died in 1997.