Canal 5, The Part-Time Network
When DXers were most confused
Based on a piece I wrote on the WTFDA Forums on May 24, 2015.
The year is 1989. You are a TV DXer used to handling US and Canadian stations. Sure, you’ve caught a few Mexicans, but they’re a different beast: they’re all in Spanish and there’s often missing data on new events in Mexican TV.
So what the heck is this thing?
For a DXer, this is a very easy to read ID. But where the heck are Altzomoni and Las Lajas? And “T.V. Matutina” — how does this Morning TV business fit into the Televisa near-monopoly?
Frank Merrill, one of the all-time DX greats, said this in the September 1989 VHF-UHF Digest:
I have since seen this on a number of times on channels 5 and 6. They have a flashing no-frills ID which says “XEX Altzomoni XHAJ Las Lajas TV Matutina”, but I can find none of these place names in my Encyclopaedia Britannica Atlas. I have noticed that the channel 6 is usually coming in along with Monterrey FMs. … Their ID slide is a DXer’s dream because I have sometimes seen it flashing for as long as five minutes: call letters are HUGE!
I believe the 1989 discussion above is the first time Altzomoni appeared in the VUD, as Altzomoni only ever broadcast high-VHF analog television and would not have been a regular by e-skip.
The first mention of Las Lajas — the transmitter site of record for Televisa (plus XHGV, the SPR and now Telsusa) in central Veracruz — in a VUD is by Pat Dyer in August 1970:
XEX and XHAJ’s “Morning TV” deal was a way to reduce the redundancy of these stations in the morning. Beginning in 1968, the Canal 5 network broadcast Telesecundaria programming from the SEP to rural secondary schools, and this tied up the network until mid-afternoon. In Mexico City, two Canal 5 stations were receivable, XHGC and XEX (which had, by this point, moved to channel 8 in the central Mexico frequency swap of 1985). So beginning in 1987, XEX began broadcasting general entertainment programming while most of the rest of the network was in Telesecundaria mode. TV Matutina also spread to a number of major cities, including Tampico, Saltillo, Guadalajara, Querétaro, Cuernavaca and Monterrey. (In Guadalajara, there was even some local programming.)
Programming on the TV Matutina block, which became known as Supercadena 8 in 1990, was eclectic: cartoons, older novelas and library programming, and films, as well as repeats of last night’s newscasts. With the 1990 expansion came late-night programming after 11pm. (This block also reaired programming from the US, sometimes right off the bird, as the sight of KCNC weather warnings on Mexican stations attests.)
XEX was a solid performer, enough so that in 1993, Televisa opted to take XEQ channel 9, which had been a cultural station, and turn it into a full commercial operation again with a similar, family-oriented lineup. In its place on the Canal 5 stations was home shopping programming. And by the late 1990s, with Telesecundaria delivered by satellite, it was XEQ/Galavisión that was part-time and Canal 5 that was full-time, paving the way for an era of local Galavisión/Gala TV affiliates that would last another two decades.
