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 firm
Baeza Group, the venture capital firm Syncom 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. 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, the network announced it would move V-me off PBS member stations 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. Most 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. The network has since pursued expanded cable carriage, along with distribution on
AT&T U-verse,
Dish Network and
DirecTV and their associated streaming services, and the network was added nationwide at the start of October 2022 on
Spectrum systems. ==Programming==