Before Pongalo emerged as a global hub for Spanish-language entertainment, its foundation was laid by an entirely different kind of company. Inmoo, founded by tech entrepreneur Sergio Radovcic, began as a digital destination for independent films and documentaries. The platform provided thousands of titles to viewers across computers, smartphones, tablets, and connected TVs, targeting an audience hungry for indie cinema rather than mainstream Hollywood blockbusters.
Inmoo’s model centered on accessibility and distribution rather than original production. It built a robust backend capable of supporting multi-device streaming at a time when most platforms were still experimenting with early OTT delivery. That tech would soon find a much larger stage.
In January 2015, Latin Everywhere, co-founded by Rich Hull and Jorge Granier, acquired Inmoo for its tech infrastructure. The move provided the engineering backbone for a far more ambitious idea: to create a dedicated streaming service for Spanish-speaking audiences around the world.
Building Pongalo: A Platform for the Global Spanish-Speaking Audience
Following the acquisition, Latin Everywhere launched the beta version of Pongalo, a web and mobile streaming service offering what it billed as one of the largest collections of telenovelas in the world. The name, derived from the Spanish phrase for “play it,” reflected the company’s aim to make content easily accessible across devices and borders.
At launch, Pongalo offered more than 10,000 telenovela episodes and over 50,000 hours of television, film, and children’s programming from partners such as RCTV (Venezuela) and Caracol Televisión (Colombia). Early hits included Juana la Virgen, the telenovela that inspired The CW’s Jane the Virgin.
The platform began as a free, ad-supported service, with plans for a premium subscription model to follow. It also differentiated itself by focusing on mobile-first consumption, targeting what Hull and Granier called the “tech-savvy and mobile-oriented Hispanic audience.” At the time, U.S. Hispanics were among the most engaged streaming users and fastest adopters of smartphones, representing a rapidly growing segment of entertainment consumers.
Pongalo positioned itself not as a niche play but as a mainstream home for Latino culture, built on accessibility, nostalgia, and representation.
Acquisition and Expansion Through Vix
In 2019, Vix, a digital media brand specializing in Spanish-language lifestyle and entertainment content, acquired Pongalo. The deal expanded Vix’s long-form catalog and gave it a proven streaming infrastructure to complement its short-form social content network.
That acquisition would become the foundation of something much larger. Within three years, TelevisaUnivision acquired Vix and folded its assets into the broader ViX and ViX Plus ecosystem, now the centerpiece of its global streaming strategy. Pongalo’s catalog, technology, and audience relationships became integral to that transformation, helping ViX scale into a platform that now serves tens of millions of monthly active users across more than 20 countries.
Legacy and Lessons: From Infrastructure to Influence
The evolution from Inmoo to Pongalo to ViX mirrors the broader trajectory of streaming itself, from early infrastructure experimentation to audience specialization and finally to strategic consolidation. Inmoo’s technology made Pongalo possible. Pongalo’s culturally focused catalog made ViX scalable. Together, they helped define the template for regional streaming success.
Recent reporting underscores how that early vision continues to pay off. According to Ampere Analysis, ViX is projected to be the fastest-growing major subscription streaming service in the Americas in 2025, with an expected 18% increase in its subscriber base and a forecasted 10.5 million paying subscribers by year-end. ViX remains one of the few streamers operating near sustained profitability.
Its hybrid model, which combines free ad-supported tiers with premium ad-free options, has become a textbook example of how to balance reach and revenue. The platform has also expanded through strategic bundles with Disney+, Charter, OXXO, and Mercado Libre, allowing it to grow distribution without relying solely on direct-to-consumer acquisition.
This multi-tiered strategy has solidified ViX’s position as the leading Spanish-language streamer and as a stabilizing force for TelevisaUnivision, which reported 10 million global subscribers in mid-2025, up from 7 million at the end of 2023.
For the team behind Pongalo, that is long-term validation. A decade ago, they saw an unserved audience and built a platform around it. Today, the results speak for themselves.
The DNA of Inmoo and Pongalo lives on in ViX’s infrastructure, catalog depth, and cultural approach. What began as an indie streaming platform for independent films became the backbone of one of the fastest-growing streaming services in the Western Hemisphere.
Innovation often begins on the margins. Those who see value in specificity before it scales are the ones who shape what the mainstream becomes.
