The official announcement yesterday that the Disney-owned ABC News has teamed with Univision to launch a 24-hour cable news channel for English-speaking Latinos next year is just the latest in a series of similar announcements from media companies.

In the past two years, we’ve seen English-language ventures aimed at a Latino audience that include Fox News Latino, HuffPost Latino Voices and Patch Latino.

There has also been the more recent launch of Voxxi, a English-language website for “acculturated Latinos” headed by a former editor from Spain’s EFE news agency, and a new bilingual YouTube content network, MiTu. And while we’re on ventures with creative names, let’s not forget mun2, the Telemundo-affiliated cable network for young Latinos with content in English and Spanish.

Not long ago, most content directed at Latinos, on air and in print, was in Spanish. Why the language shift, especially as media companies focus more on digital content? Back in February, when news of the Disney-Univision partnership first came to light, I posted a Q&A with Giovanni Rodriguez, a social-technology and marketing expert with Deloitte Consulting who studies and writes about the Latino media market. Here’s a bit of what Rodriguez had to say about the power of content en inglés, and why marketers and media execs seem to be discovering it now:

True, it does feel like the interest in English has come all of a sudden. But in fact, the market has been moving in this direction over the last few years. Fox launched its English-language site Fox News Latino back in 2010, just weeks before the mid-term congressional elections. And there were several, though less visible, experiments in English-language content before that.

Read the full story at Multi-American