Word: channeler
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Muhammad Ali, a puffy and nearly immobile promoter for a new cable channel called American Sports Classics, sat in a director's chair as a line of people trooped up, one by one, to sit next to him, shake his hand and get a Polaroid memento of the occasion. Comedy Central enlivened the floor at the cable-TV industry's national convention two weeks ago with an array of carnival games, like Skee Ball. CBS, pushing its new cable channel, Eye on People, took a more subdued approach, with a booth featuring plush blue carpeting, comfortable seating and lots...
Starting new channels has never been easy, but CBS's much belated entry into the cable sweepstakes, which debuts this week, is facing tougher odds than most. The network, to a great extent, has only itself to blame. While its broadcast rivals were busily getting into the cable business (ABC with ESPN; NBC with CNBC and America's Talking; Fox with FX and the Fox News Channel), CBS sat on its hands--or rather, on chairman Laurence Tisch's tight fists. That finally changed in 1995, when the company was sold to Westinghouse, which already owned a piece...
...People is far from the only case in which major resources and talent are being lavished on cable channels watched by almost no one. espnews, a 24-hour sports-news channel launched in November, is available in only about 1 million cable homes. Its chief competitor, CNN/SI (which is owned by Time Warner, also the parent of TIME), has managed to corral just 4 million. The Fox News Channel and MSNBC, two network-backed news channels launched last year to compete with CNN, have passed the 20 million and 30 million marks, respectively. Yet their average audience, according to preliminary...
With more focused channels like America's Health Network and the Sundance Channel competing for scarce channel space, why should Eye on People survive? Geoffrey Darby, a former top executive at Nickelodeon who was named president of the channel two months ago, makes a game effort to define its niche: "When you want to see stories about people, this is where you'll go." Yet Lloyd Werner, executive vice president of sales and marketing, admits that cable operators have so far reacted with "skepticism." Says he: "I've been doing this for 15 years, and it's never been...
...trying to buy its way onto the dial, as channels like Fox News and Animal Planet (from the creators of the Discovery Channel) have done by offering money to cable systems in return for carrying them. Yet CBS does have some potential clout to wield. It could hold up permission for cable systems to retransmit local CBS stations unless they agree to pick up Eye on People--a tactic the other broadcast networks have used in order to get wider distribution for their start-up cable ventures...