By Janko Roettgers @ Gigaom

DirecTV soft-launched its Latino streaming service Yaveo Monday, offering three live TV feeds channels as well some 2700 hours of on-demand content for $7.99 per month. Yaveo operates completely separate from DirecTV, meaning that subscribers won’t have to have an existing satellite TV subscription to access any of the content.

Yaveo’s live line-up comes from Hola TV, BeIn Sports and Cine Sony Television, and the service’s on-demand content is being supplied by Univision, MTV, Cine Sony Television, Caracol, TMN, Nick en Español, Canal Once and others. Gigaom readers will recognize many of those names: I’ve been following Yaveo closely over the last couple of months, revealing both its name and key details of its programming-line upbefore it was officially announced.

Most of the programming is Spanish-language content at this time, but the service itself is in Spanish and English, and Yaveo’s help pages promise English-language subtitles to be added at some point in the future. The service is currently available on the web as well as on Android, but DirecTV promises to bring it to iOS as well as connected TV platforms like the Xbox, Chromecast and Roku soon.

 

Yaveo has internally been known as HOTT, which stands for Hispanic OTT. Here’s the internal placeholder logo of the service.

DirecTV has been working on Yaveo internally for at least a year; the service is internally known as HOTT, or “Hispanic OTT.” For the satellite TV service operator, Yaveo is a first of what could eventually become a whole bouquet of online streaming services focused on niche audiences, something the company’s chief revenue officer Paul Guyardo alluded to in Yaveo’s launch press release, which quoted him saying:

“Yaveo gets DIRECTV into the OTT business and we’re excited to start with a compelling Spanish-language service targeted to the Hispanic community We’ll learn a great deal, use the findings to grow and improve the Yaveo platform and expand our OTT offering over time.”

This focus on the niche bodes well forDirecTV’s proposed merger with AT&T, which itself is targeting the niche for its online TV plans. AT&T and the Chernin Group have jointly earmarked $500 million for Otter Media, the niche-focused online video joint-venture that now owns the majority of both Fullscreen and Crunchyroll.

Check this out at Gigaom.com