Imagen on television In 2006, Imagen's parent,
Grupo Empresarial Ángeles, acquired
XHRAE-TV channel 28 in Mexico City from its previous owner, beleaguered businessman Raúl Aréchiga Espinoza, for US$126 million. Imagen already owned radio stations in Mexico City and other major cities nationwide. The next year, GEA relaunched the station as "cadenatres", with the ambition of functioning as Mexico's third broadcast network. Despite this and national basic cable carriage, cadenatres only had a handful of local affiliates. On October 26, 2015, cadenatres was shuttered and replaced with news outlet
Excélsior TV as Imagen began preparing to launch its national network.
A new national network In 2014, the
Federal Telecommunications Institute began a bidding process to make available packages of new national television networks. Two packages were available, each containing 123 transmitters. Three bidders continued to the final round: Grupo Imagen, under the name Cadena Tres I, S.A. de C.V.;
Grupo Radio Centro; and
Organización Editorial Mexicana (Centro de Información Nacional de Estudios Tepeyac, S.A. de C.V.), which operates the ABC Radio network. OEM dropped out unexpectedly just days before the death of its CEO,
Mario Vázquez Raña, paving the way for Cadena Tres I and GRC to be declared the winning bidders on March 11, 2015. Imagen paid 1.808 billion pesos for the concession. Radio Centro, whose bid was significantly higher, subsequently ran into financial problems and dropped out, paying only the security deposit; thus, Imagen would be the only new national network created as the result of the bidding process. The concessions held by Imagen bind them to two coverage clauses; they must serve 30 percent of the population in each of the 32 Mexican federative entities by March 2018, and within five years of the concession award, all 123 transmitters must be on air. Imagen's CEO,
Olegario Vázquez Aldir, also announced a planned investment of 10 billion pesos to build out the network over 36 to 40 months. Some of this investment went into building
Ciudad Imagen (Imagen City), a new facility in the Copilco neighborhood of Mexico City with of floor space, five studios for entertainment programs, a sixth for news, and three radio studios. In October 2015, Imagen was approved to relocate all stations planned to be built above channel 36, in order to facilitate the repacking of television spectrum. Several other transmitters changed allocated channels as a result. The first of the launch transmitters to come to air was the Mexico City station,
XHCTMX-TDT, which signed on with color bars on August 19, 2016. In late September, the launch date was announced as Monday, October 17, and Imagen unveiled a new corporate logo designed by
Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv, a New York-based graphic design firm, which will also serve as the network's logo. In addition, the name of the network, Imagen Televisión, was formally announced, along with the initial slogan
Juntos Somos Libres; Vázquez Aldir cited the desire to not merely be "the third network" and to have a more forward-looking moniker as reasons to bypass the Cadena Tres name. The launch makes Imagen the first new national commercial network to begin operations in Mexico since the privatization of
Imevisión and resultant creation of
Televisión Azteca in 1993. ==Programming==