Color Visión

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 30th of November 1969, in the city of Santiago de los Caballeros, a television signal flickered to life from inside a hotel. Color Visión had begun its regularly scheduled programming, broadcasting from the Matum hotel. The station had been founded the year before, on the 25th of July 1968, as the first color television station in the Dominican Republic. It was also the third such company in all of Latin America. Today it sits at channel 9 on the Dominican television dial, one of the largest channels in the country. How does a broadcaster that started inside a hotel grow into a national fixture? What kept it alive across more than five decades of changing technology and shifting taste? And what does its programming reveal about Dominican television itself?

• 2. From Hotel To Studio

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  In 1970, Color Visión moved its daily transmissions from Santiago to Santo Domingo. There it pressed the famous Hotel Jaragua into service, using the hotel's areas as television sets. The arrangement was makeshift but workable, and one of the first show hosts to appear was Manolo Quiroz. The reliance on borrowed hotel space did not last. Dominican businessman Poppy Bermudez put a large amount of money into helping the station open its own studio. That investment gave Color Visión a permanent home of its own, and set the stage for the growth that followed.

• 3. Building A Roster

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  The 1970s were times of growth for the company, as many locally produced programs filled the schedule. Among the people who found work at the station was Jack Veneno, who carved out a niche among Dominican television viewers. The talent pipeline widened in the following decade. During the 1980s, Color Visión contracted such stars as Freddy Beras-Goico, a cousin of Charytín Goico, along with Miledys Cabral. For the next twenty years, the channel continued growing nationally, drawing on a deepening bench of on-air personalities. By the time of its fiftieth anniversary, the arrival of Jochy Santos added another familiar face to that lineage.

• 4. Reaching New Screens

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  Color Visión became the first Dominican channel to carry live internet telecasts, an early step beyond the traditional broadcast dial. In 2003, it began to air its programs in the United States through the DirecTV system, on a channel called NDTV. That channel was operated by the US company Nexus International Broadcasting, and Color Visión's programming made up the bulk of its output. The push toward new formats accelerated decades later. The network announced it would start broadcasting in 4K in 2025, and on the 8th of March 2025 it began broadcasting in the new format, the first in the country to do so.

• 5. Deals And Anniversaries

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  In 2019, the year of its fiftieth anniversary, Color Visión premiered Dominica's Got Talent, based on the international Got Talent franchise. The network was also conducting technological improvements across its four studios and had secured an output deal with Sony Pictures Entertainment. The partnerships kept coming. An agreement with NBCUniversal was reached in December 2024, which let the network air titles from that catalog starting in January 2025, especially Telemundo's telenovelas. These arrangements gave the channel a steady supply of imported programming to sit alongside its homegrown shows.

• 6. What The Schedule Says

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  Hoy Mismo has run on Color Visión since 2000, one of many fixtures that anchor the weekday lineup. The channel offers variety and news shows, telenovelas, and other types of programming spread across every day of the week. Some titles stretch back to the station's earliest years; Mundo Vision aired from 1969 to 2014, nearly the full span of the channel's first half-century. As of 2023, its telenovelas were sourced from Turkey and the Philippines, along with titles from Caracol Televisión. That mix of long-running local staples and imported drama defines what a viewer finds at channel 9.