ANNIVERSARY | SORTS | TV | STREAMING
Since the 1962 World Cup, the 2023 Pan American Games and all the Copa América since 2001: Channel 13 created the first sports area of Chilean TV, maintaining a presence in the great milestones of sport in Chile and the rest of the world.
Andrés Canales, executive producer of Deportes 13, highlights that “throughout its history, Channel 13 has been and will be a pillar in the transmission of sporting events, contributing significantly to the development and dissemination of sport in Chile.”
Broadcasts of soccer World Cups, Olympic and Pan American Games, and important tennis championships, among other sports coverage and disciplines and the greatest sporting triumphs of the country have been enjoyed on Channel 13. “The channel has connected with the audience with historic triumphs and Chilean athletes, leaving the name of our country and abroad on high.”
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It was born as Universidad Católica de Chile Televisión (UC-TV) and technology was the spearhead
The first sporting event was the ‘1962 FIFA World Cup’, held in Chile, where early broadcasts by Channel 13 helped popularize television in the country thanks to a team of 5 cameras, a transmitter and a link team. The TV station broadcast the matches of Chile against Italy, Germany against Switzerland, the quarter-finals, the semi-finals and the final of the championship, where Pelé’s Brazil won and Chile took third place.
After that milestone, the World Cups became a classic of 13, which began to be considered “The World Cup channel” after its coverage of England 1966 and Mexico 1970.
The current face of Deportes 13, Ignacio Valenzuela, fondly remembers the emblematic broadcasts of 13 in those years. “I dedicated myself to sports journalism because since I was a child I have liked sports and also television. My role models when I was a kid were Tito Fouillioux, Julio Martínez and Néstor Isella, so my first internship was at Channel 13. I have fulfilled my dream by working in the place where I always dreamed of working,” he recalls.
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Channel 13 also stood out for its great coverage of the Olympic Games, from the 1972 Munich Games, where the 13 sports section produced the classic melody composed by the German Herbert Rehbein, through to the Olympic Games in Montreal (1976), Los Angeles (1984), Seoul (1988), Barcelona (1992), Atlanta (1996), Sydney (2000), Beijing (2008) and London (2012). Channel 13 not only had presenters from other areas, such as Javier Miranda, but also teams of professionals from various disciplines in charge of analyzing the different sports.
At the beginning of the 2000s, Channel 13’s sports area was renamed Deportes 13, modernizing the image and expanding coverage through various digital platforms.
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Sports on T13 live and 13Go in the digital multiverse
Focused on multiplatforms, the sports broadcasts of open TV channel 13 also move to the digital multiverse.
This is how, since 2023, Deportes 13 has added the free application 13Go as a broadcasting platform, which allowed the creation of 8 dedicated channels in the APP where it broadcasts more than 15 hours a day of different disciplines.
That same year, it added channel 2 of 13, called T13 Live, which, along with its news broadcast, hosts sporting events such as Formula E.
“We continue to look for the best events, such as the World Cups in football, athletics, etc., where we can tell the stories not only of our athletes but also of the most important figures in the world,” summarizes Andrés Canales, executive producer of Deportes 13.
Redacción TVMAS