Mega (Spain)

Mega is Spanish entertainment television network owned by Atresmedia. The channel broadcasts series, entertainment, documentaries, reality-shows and sports programmings.

History[]

Mega was launched on 19th September 2008 as Gol Televisión. Launch of the broadcast for sports.

On 2010, Gol Televisión was launched in HD simulcast.

After the closing of channels that took place on May 6, 2014, as a result of a ruling of the Supreme Court of Justice that annulled the TDT broadcasting concessions for nine channels, as they were granted without the mandatory public bidding that governs the General Law of Audiovisual Communication, Atresmedia was interested in recovering the license for which Gol Televisión issued by the end of 2015. One year later, on May 28, 2015, the cessation of broadcasts of the football channel was announced for June 30 of the same year, since Mediapro had reached an agreement with Al Jazeera to jointly launch BeIN Sports in Spain, a sports pay channel that broadcasts in several countries around the world since its launch in the Middle East, which had place in 2003. Thus, Atresmedia reached an agreement with Mediapro to recover the frequency of DTT and announced the creation of Mega for the month of July.

Later, on June 22, 2015, Gol Televisión began broadcasting openly during a period of four hours a day (between 20:30 and 00:30 hours), so that the spectators could capture the broadcasts in open of Mega in said schedule. In addition, three days later, Mega's emissions began during those four hours, broadcasting the programs Pawn Stars (3 chapters), American Pickers (2 chapters) and Hardcore Pawn (4 chapters). Arrived at 00:30, the channel returned to Gol Televisión's programming, coding its signal again.

On 1st July 2015, Gol Televisión was splited into Mega (owned by Atresmedia) and BeIN Sports (owned by BeIN Media Group).

Finally, Atresmedia launched Mega on July 1, which meant the end of premium or paid DTT and the recovery of the television genres that covered Nitro and Xplora until the closing of television channels in 2014.

In its first month of life, Mega won a monthly average of 2.1% share, becoming the best premiere of an open thematic television channel. Its average tied with the also 2.1% of share that Discovery Max obtained in July, and it surpassed its direct competition, Energy, which obtained a discreet 1.7%.

On October 1, 2015, the channel was added to the Vodafone TV operator's dial, with a delay of 3 months compared to the scheduled date.