The Lake Shore Drive apartment inhabited by Joan Epstein and her family boasts a bathroom and kitchen so lovely that they will be featured on a national television network in early fall.
The Epsteins needn’t worry, however, about their functional rooms growing aloof with celebrity. The network, Home & Garden Television, is one of the scores of latecomers to the cable revolution, struggling not just to produce good programs but also to persuade cable-system operators to make their signals available.
So in the Chicago area, the debut of the Epstein rooms–on programs called “Bath Design” and “Kitchen Design”–will be available to their friends who live in Highland Park, but not in their own building; and to business acquaintances who live in Springfield, but not in Olympia Fields. HGTV has only a tiny toehold on Illinois cable. Across the country, it is available in just 6.5 million of 95.4 million television households.
And it is, after all, Home & Garden Television. So even if it is on your cable system, you’d have to know a whole lot about the system’s nether channels, reject a truckload of other television offerings, and be something of a soulmate to Martha Stewart to even have a chance of tuning in to catch the red laminate and maple kitchen and seafoam green bathroom that Epstein, an accessories consultant, designed with her brother, Scott Himmel, an architect.
Though its programming concept may seem absurdly singleminded to outsiders, HGTV is thought by cable insiders to be one of the more promising new channels wielding market research, videocassettes and sharp elbows in the battle to merely be admitted to the public arena.
And compared to some of its competitors, HGTV, with its rather democratic interpretation of its title terms, is a veritable general-interest channel. Its programming, about 75 percent of it original, includes “Willard Scott’s Home and Garden Almanac,” “Spencer Christian’s Wine Cellar,” and a car care show hosted by a 65-year-old grandmother.
Finding a place on the dial “is incredibly hard and not just for us,” says Steve Astor, marketing vice president for Game Show Network, which began airing in December with a lineup of classic game shows and new interactive ones viewers play via telephone.
“Unless they have the Second Coming Channel and they have the actual tape of His return, cable operators would say, `Well, maybe in ’97 after a rebuild, and what are you going to pay us?’ ” Astor says.
Something for everyone
A sampling of other adolescent, infant and prenatal networks–a March compilation by Cablevision magazine lists 155 launched since January 1993 or hoping to launch soon–reads like a what’s-what of human hobbies, habits and hubris.
The listing is titled the New Network Handbook, but it might as well be called Channels You Don’t Get. Among them: Cable Health Club, The Military Channel, The Seminar Channel, Celticvision, Sewing and Needle Arts Network, WorldJazz…
These are self-explanatory, if not exactly the concepts that will push you to finally buy that second VCR.
Others require some clarification. What, for instance, is Chop TV’s turf? (A) Rapid disassemblages of autos with weak chain-of-title. (B) 1,001 ways to prepare pork. (C) Martial arts. The answer is–drum roll, please–C.
Gloriously unconcerned about compatibility, Share TV bills itself as a “multi-niche service, covering the worlds of pets, weddings and books”–never mind that there are already the mono-niche services, Pet Television Network and Booknet, and that half a dozen business plans for a wedding channel are surely in circulation.
The Popcorn Channel plans to present not an endless diet of liquid butter substitutes and Orville Redenbacher life moments but “preview channels of new motion pictures with localized theater listings,” according to Cablevision’s compilation.
The CEO Channel is one that you frankly cannot believe could mean what it seems to mean. It must be general-interest business news or inspirational stories of entrepreneurship or some such. But, no, it, indeed, pledges to present 18 hours each weekday of “programs of interest to the world’s corporate leaders.”
The scary thing is, there’s already a channel with the same concept. It’s called the Golf Channel. Ba-dum-bump.
A lot to ignore
In this environment, the standard jokes about cable fracturing into entities such as The Pedicure Channel and Test Pattern TV seem tame. For the truth about the storied 500-channel future is that the average viewer won’t have the slightest interest in probably 300 of them, and a big chunk will likely consist not of distinct channels but of single ones made more user friendly: things like a pay-per-view movie that occupies six channels but starts at 15-minute intervals, or Encore’s currently available service adding to the basic pay movie channel those showing only specific genres (love stories, Westerns, mysteries, action and drama/true stories).
No room on the dial
In the meantime, though, the obscure startup channels have to face the fact that a whole lot of people don’t yet get a whole lot of channels they have heard of, like E! (in essence, “Entertainment Tonight” writ large), the Sci-Fi Channel, Turner Classic Movies and the History Channel.
The reason people don’t get most of these is a complicated web of cable rate regulation, technological capacity and consumer demand. The cable companies don’t want to pay for new channels for which they cannot pass the cost directly on to consumers, and government has only recently allowed that to happen. With the new telecommunications bill currently in Congress, restrictions may loosen even further–though whether that will be a good or bad thing for consumers is a matter of heated debate.
In the meantime, most cable systems can handle only about 50 channels and are full up. To add more channels is possible, but it means compressing the existing signals so that 6 or 10 channels can fit where one used to be. (This, by the way, is the best guess to why “500 channels” came to be the buzz figure: 50 times 10.) Doing this means, in many places, upgrading or changing equipment.
And there are real questions as to how many more channels the public wants or needs. Studies show most people, even if they have 70 channels, tend to keep to familiar turf. While they may make money, even the veteran cable networks aren’t reaching anything close to the broad audience of the Big Four networks. MTV, for instance, reaps reams of free publicity, is so established that it is a brand name, and has virtually no competition at the moment; yet during an average moment in an average week in 1994, according to Nielsen ratings, the network was on in only 0.5 percent of homes, or about 500,000 nationwide.
A growing business
But there is, for the dedicated channel surfer and even for the guy who merely wants to get the most bang for his cable buck, an undeniable thrill in discovering new channels. Spinning recently through the numbers in the 70s on my home system, Chicago Cable, I discovered I was now apparently getting ESPN2, The Learning Channel and a couple of others–though perhaps it’s only on a trial basis; my cable company communicates about as well with me as does my neighbor’s cat. But my excitement, wholly unrelated to how much I had actually been interested in getting the channels, was equal parts intense and embarrassing.
On the other hand, many cable systems are completing the first round of rebuilds, which means increased numbers of channels are becoming available, though consumers should expect to pay more for what are called new programming “tiers,” or packages of channels. And competition with cable for delivery of channels–from current home satellite systems to anticipated telephone-line delivery–is becoming a reality and may goad systems into offering more choice.
As a subsidiary of cable giant TCI, my home system is one of those showing TCI’s intriguing experiment in channel sampling. Called tv!, it’s a single channel that lifts blocks of programming whole from services that aren’t available on the system.
“Really, tv! Network is a marketing tool for the expanded channel capacity of the future,” says Sharon Hancock Brown, the network’s vice president of programming and strategic marketing.
Come October, tv! will be sampling some 30 networks, but, she says, many more come knocking. “We’re having to become very selective. We want to balance the exploration of program genres for the future with the opportunity to make sales for TCI today.”
Thus, “when we give on a Wednesday night a full 3-hour block to the Disney Channel, we’re out there with an 800 number taking orders.”
Brown says the U.S. is in the fourth wave of cable channels–the first included CNN, USA and ESPN; the second Discovery and the Learning Channel; the third Court TV, Sci-Fi and the Cartoon Network–and for the startups to survive, “what they’re going to have to do is prove that they have a business that’s going to drive subscriptions more than a pay-per-view channel or a movie channel.”
