Vme is a Spanish-language broadcast television network formerly carried in association with public television stations created for the United States Hispanic market. It is currently pursuing a subscription-based video on demand model. Vme delivers drama, music, current affairs, food, lifestyle, nature and educational pre-school content to its viewers.
History
The 24-hour digital broadcast service was launched on March 5, 2007, with a stated mission to entertain, educate and inspire families in Spanish with a contemporary mix of original productions, exclusive premieres, acquisitions, and popular public television programs from PBS and American Public Television, specially adapted for American Latinos. The first venture of the media production and distribution company V-me Television Media Inc., it is a public-private partnership between WNET, a non-commercial educational public television station licensed to Newark, New Jersey, and the investment firmBaeza Group, the venture capital firmSyncom Funds, and Grupo PRISA from Spain, one of the world's largest Spanish and Portuguese-language media companies. WNET is a minority partner in the for-profit venture. In April 2013, a Florida-based private investor group took control of V-me Media, Inc., the U.S. Hispanic content and distribution company that owns Spanish-language network V-me and V-me Kids. Financial terms of the deal and the percentage of the ownership of the new investors was not disclosed. The V-me Board includes former AOL executive and founder and CEO of DailyMe.com, chairman of the board, Syncom managing partner Terry Jones and WNET’s VP and general counselRobert Feinberg. V-me founder, Mario Baeza, stepped down as chairman, but will continue to have an ownership interest. LPM is the largest stakeholder in V-me. Among the journalists who have worked for V-me are Jorge Gestoso, Juan Manuel Benitez, Luis Sarmiento, Alonso Castillo, Jackeline Cacho and Marián de la Fuente. In December 2016, PBS announced that V-me would end its operations in 2017, following the expiration of the network's 10-year contracts with many of these stations, and transition exclusively to being broadcast on ten over-the-air affiliates and as a cable and satellite channel. One of V-me's over-the-air affiliates were dropped by March 31, 2017; many of these affiliates had already chosen to replace V-me with a 24-hour PBS Kids channel, which launched on January 16, 2017. V-me lost several of its affiliates upon the launch of the PBS Kids channel.
Programming
The network broadcasts a variety of programming in Spanish:
