BBC extending its Spanish-language service (BBC Mundo) in the United States

Short but interesting bit of news here on BBC's plan to extend its Spanish-language service in the US. The first paragraph gives some general information on the plans:

BBC World Service's Spanish-language service, BBCMundo.com, is extending its presence in the Hispanic market by forging a regional alliance with MSN across Latin America and the United States to provide Spanish-language content online. The 2-year agreement, whose financials were not disclosed, includes audio, video clips and text news carrying information from BBC and BBCMundo.

but what's more interesting is the fact that BBC Mundo already gets a large chunk of its traffic from the US already, half that of the internet traffic coming from Mexico, so definitely nothing to sneeze at:

Of the total visitors, said Villalobos, about 30% come from Mexico, but already up to 15% of total traffic originates within the United States. "This is quite amazing, considering we do very little in the form of promoting the site," he said. Content on BBCMundo.com is free to the users, and, as is the case with other BBC content, is not supported by advertising.

This is another sign that Spanish isn't going anywhere in the United States. One factor that often contributes to the loss of a language amongst immigrants is the lack of good information in their mother tongue in the country they've immigrated to (that's why German immigrants in the US eventually switched over to English) but with quality content produced by a major broadcaster like the BBC there's much more information available through Spanish alone; and at the same time the maintenance of this large block of people keeps broadcasters and advertisers interested, in a kind of positive feedback loop that keeps the language vital and useful.

That's the problem IALs always have by the way - not enough people speak those languages so broadcasters and other media aren't interested, and since they're not very interested nobody knows much about these languages. It's the opposite situation to the above. Only a serious linguistic deadlock (where it's obvious that no language is capable of becoming the world's second language by itself) can bring about a change to this status quo.