Grupo Televisa

After years of bad blood and nearly three weeks of court testimony, Mexico's entertainment giant Grupo Televisa and the dominant Spanish-language TV company in the U.S., Univision Communications Inc., abruptly ended their four-year legal battle Thursday. The settlement averted a potentially disastrous outcome for Univision, which could have lost its pipeline of Televisa's popular soap operas, called telenovelas, that drive Univision's enormous ratings.

A federal judge in Los Angeles on Friday handed Univision Communications a major victory in its hard-fought battle with its programming partner from Mexico, underscoring Univision's exclusive rights in the U.S. to the wildly popular Spanish-language soap operas that fuel its huge ratings. Grupo Televisa, Mexico's largest entertainment company, had sought the judge's permission to transmit to U.S.

A real-life soap opera in Spanish-language television -- a saga of family legacy, corporate ambition and allegations of treachery -- is expected to shift today to a federal courtroom in Los Angeles. The civil trial will pit two titans against each other and bring to the witness stand key executives who are accustomed to controlling the media behind the scenes rather than fighting over it in open court.

Practically since the day he was born, in 1968, Emilio Azcarraga Jean has owned one of the most famous names in Mexico. That's because his father, Emilio Azcarraga Milmo, also known as "El Tigre" (The Tiger), was among the hemisphere's richest men and head of a sprawling media empire. His empire's cornerstone was Grupo Televisa, the giant Mexican television broadcaster that for decades operated as a monopoly. Although Mexico now has a second national network, TV Azteca, Televisa remains by far the country's dominant broadcaster, with an unrivaled power to influence not only Mexicans' entertainment preferences but also their ideas about politics, business and the rest of the world.

Some of the best Spanish-language television dramas delve into the ambitions and rancorous relationships within powerful Latino families. Instead of playing each night on TV screens, though, this tale of a tumultuous 16-year marriage, fraught with allegations of treachery and bad faith, will begin to unfold this week in a federal courtroom in Los Angeles.

Mexico's legislature caved. So did its president. Now, the nation is tuning in to see whether Grupo Televisa and TV Azteca can get their way with the Supreme Court. In what's being billed as one of the most important legal decisions in recent years, the high court next week will begin reviewing the constitutionality of a controversial broadcasting law pushed through Congress by the TV giants last year.

Grupo Televisa, Mexico's largest media conglomerate, plans to expand its reach in the U.S. by teaming up with an American studio to make movies and television shows and to distribute its growing film library. Televisa signed a partnership agreement last week with Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.

Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., the largest independent U.S. film studio, confirmed it would work with Grupo Televisa, the biggest Spanish-language broadcaster, to enter the Latin American market. The companies will co-produce films and television programs in the U.S. and in Mexico, Lions Gate Chief Executive Jon Feltheimer said. Terms of the agreement, reported last month by The Times, weren't disclosed.

Grupo Televisa has won a court ruling that could allow the Mexican broadcasting giant to move closer to ending its tumultuous relationship with Univision Communications Inc., the largest Spanish-language media company in the United States. U.S. District Court Judge Philip S. Gutierrez in Los Angeles on Monday denied Univision's request to dismiss several claims made by Televisa in a 2-year-old lawsuit.

Mexico City-based Grupo Televisa, the world's largest Spanish-language broadcaster, said it was deciding whether to make a bid for Univision Communications Inc. "I guess we are in the early stages of analyzing the different scenarios to determine whether it makes sense or not for us," Televisa Executive Vice President Alfonso de Angoitia said in a conference call with analysts.