Spanish language broadcaster Televisa-Univision has agreed to pay $300,000 to settle claims that it violated federal children’s advertising laws on some of its U.S. broadcast stations several years ago.
The claims related to Spanish broadcasts of the Japanese cartoon “Pokémon” that aired on nearly four dozen stations owned by Television-Univision that air programming from its UniMás network.
According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Televisa-Univision admitted some of its stations aired excessive commercial content aimed at children during a two-month period in 2017. Normally, stations are required to limit their commercials to no more than 12 minutes per hours of children’s programming during weekdays, but some stations aired nearly 16 minutes of commercial breaks during Pokémon, which ran from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. during the week.
Separately, the FCC took issue with several broadcasts of the children’s show “Pocoyo” when several stations owned by Televisa-Univision displayed a commercial website in the final seconds of the program. The address pointed to a website called Mundo Lanugo, which offered merchandise for sale.
Televisa-Univision cooperated with the FCC’s investigation. To settle the matter, the broadcaster agreed to make a “voluntary” donation of $300,000 to the U.S. Treasury. Accordingly, the FCC said it will dismiss the complaint and close its investigation, which will allow Televisa-Univision to move forward with its pending broadcast TV license renewals.
The issue marks the second time in less than a month that the FCC has agreed to end one of its probes against a broadcaster accused of running afoul of children’s TV programming rules. In June, the agency did the same when Sinclair agreed to pay $500,000 to settle an investigation over commercials aired during some of its children’s programming and a separate issue related to closed captioning.
