• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, September 12, 2014

DirecTV, which can read the census and Nielsen reports as well as anybody, says it will launch an over-the-top content service aimed at Hispanic viewers.

It’s reached a licensing deal with Univision Communications, Reuters reports. And according to Variety, DirecTV CEO Mike White confirmed the OTT play will start later this year and will be called YaVeo, which translates in Spanish to “Now I see.”

What will it be like? That’s unclear, but White told conferees that DirecTV, which is in the process of being acquired by AT&T,  was looking for a niche entry into OTT.  

By courting Hispanics, DirecTV is picking a great big--and getting bigger--niche. Because content delivery in Central and South America comes mainly via satellite, in this country satellite providers like DirecTV and Dish have a built-in familiarity with Hispanic viewers. The OTT service, presumably, would trade on that DirecTV nameplate.

Gigaom has reported earlier on DirecTV’s on and off plans for a Hispanic OTT service, and says YaVeo might take the form of a Netflix-like subscription service, or a service that would stream Hispanic channels.

It seems like a reasonably obvious play, whatever form it takes. Hispanic viewers are better than average viewers, both of online video and TV, a fact spelled out again in Nielsen’s recent cross-platform report for Q2. 

That wasn’t always the case. As the Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project noted last year, online and social use has spiked considerably since 2009,  and though, persistently, Hispanic media gets short-changed at the ad-buying table, the ethnic group are now eager consumers of media devices.

Not to say any OTT service is a slam-dunk, because another language problem is that among Hispanic Internet users it’s not even close to automatic that they’ll prefer programming voiced in Spanish. Pew says 72% are bilingual, but of those, 31% classify themselves as English-dominant. So programming could be tricky. Hispanic audiences have never been as homogenous as the media biz might like to think. Guess what? They're still not.

pj@mediapost.com