Mexican Billionaire Salinas Goes After Televisa With New Cable-TV Service

Ricardo Salinas, Mexico's second-richest person, is challenging Grupo Televisa SA with a new cable-TV service in the nation's capital. Total Play, a unit of Salinas's Mexico City-based mobile-phone carrier Grupo Iusacell SA, offers packages of video, Web and phone service in 13 Mexico City neighborhoods, with plans to expand. The video service gives closely held Iusacell, which began offering Internet and land-line phone calls in parts of Mexico's three biggest cities this year, a new way to lure customers from Televisa, which controls three of the nation's largest cable-TV carriers. Salinas's TV Azteca SA is the second- biggest broadcaster in Mexico after Televisa. Total Play's packages of video, voice and Internet range from 649 pesos to 1,399 pesos ($53 to $114) a month. The cheapest plan has download speeds of as much as 5 megabits a second. The comparable package at Televisa's Mexico City carrier Empresas Cablevision SAB costs 699 pesos a month.