Moncloa hands Contreras a new TV channel with a 15-year licence

Moncloa awards Contreras a channel with a 15-year licence

The new television channel that Spain's government has awarded to José Miguel Contreras's group now has an air date: September. The licence runs for 15 years, renewable for another 15, as Contreras himself argued in the face of criticism, and the project comes after the controlling shareholder of PRISA pushed him out of the company in 2025. At the top of PRISA, according to published reports, its chairman refuses to approve a television deal that is attributed to Moncloa's backing.

The story going around is that the government is not satisfied with what it already has. Shows launched to compete head-on with El Hormiguero, current-affairs slots lined up against Iker Jiménez's formats, a new channel in the works. Whoever controls television controls the country, one debate participant summed up. The phrase is more slogan than fact, but it captures the mood.

PRISA's refusal and the internal fight over the narrative

PRISA is going through a struggle that is not fought in offices but on boards. On one side, the controlling shareholder, who in 2025 pushed out José Miguel Contreras and Carlos Núñez; on the other, a management leadership that, according to what has been published, resists aligning itself with certain deals. The report placing the company's chairman refusing to approve the television project points to an open tug-of-war between business and politics.

The paradox is striking: the man once pushed out of PRISA ends up at the helm of a new broadcasting licence. Well, on to the next one, Contreras himself wrote when the move became known, in line with the ironic messages that have accompanied his return to the front line. The sticking point is less ideological than about the business model: a listed company burdened with debt whose owners want to secure the business without depending on the mood of the government of the day.

How many people still watch free-to-air television?

Here the numbers bring some order to the noise. The range cited in the debate puts the audience for conventional television at around 15 million people, a figure falling year after year. In prime time, according to participants, the most-watched shows barely reach 2 million viewers unless football or another major event is on. News bulletins, afternoon game shows and little else dominate the daily top. Even the big recent audience peaks are explained by sporting events: tournaments like the World Cup, not political programming, were what sent the figures soaring.

In other words: television no longer moves the masses it once did, but it is not a wasteland either. Fifteen million viewers are still a huge base, albeit an ageing one that is increasingly hard to mobilise with new formats. That is why the fight is not over raw audience share but over presence, and over what that presence translates into when it is time to vote.

From deficit to the BOE: who pays for the party

The business, in raw terms, does not add up. The claim is that free-to-air channels have been in the red for years and that without institutional advertising — the kind handed out by public administrations — many would have shut down. One more channel in an already saturated digital terrestrial TV lineup competes for the same advertising pie, which is split among ever smaller audience fragments.

The most repeated thesis is that the real business is not the advertiser but proximity to power: contracts, licences, fifteen-year concessions that get renewed. The licence is precisely what is invoked to justify the project against criticism: fifteen years extendable by another fifteen, just like previous concessions.

Control of the narrative and clout at the ballot box

And we reach the point nobody lets go of: whether television really influences the vote. Some argue that the electorate watching linear TV is overrepresented at the ballot box — retirees and civil servants above all — and that a 70-30 split in that segment would decide any election. Others reply with the obvious: if the influence were what it is assumed to be, there would be no need to keep adding channels.

What is certain is that the medium is losing relative weight while the conversation on social media gains it, where the same material is clipped and repurposed for other ends. Television as a tool of pressure is weakening; as a shop window for contracts and seats of power, it loses nothing.

The spending, meanwhile, has to come from somewhere. And that somewhere, as several participants point out, is the taxpayer.