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When the clock
strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve, a technician in the master control room
will press “play” to start a reel of videotape running over a helical-scan
playback head. The signal from that head will snake through distribution
amplifiers and a lot of other complex circuitry, bounce to a satellite, then
be relayed to earth stations at cable companies across the country.
The cable companies
will pump the downlinked signal to their subscribers’ cable boxes, where it
will end up as a new TV channel — another choice accessible through people’s
remote controls.
The Life Network’s
staff of 43 will doubtless be toasting one another and reflecting on the
effort that made throwing that switch possible.
Life Network is one
of 10 specialty channels the Canadian Radio-television and
Telecommunications Commission licensed last June, one year after putting out
a call for newcomers to meet the challenge of “the rapid expansion of
digital distribution and transmission technologies.” The CRTC was trying to
increase Canadian content as choices expand for people watching TV — the
much-ballyhooed 500-channel universe.
The CRTC knew what
it wanted. “They were really specific,” says Alexandra Brown, the Life
Network’s vice-president of communications. “They. wanted people to be
innovative; they didn’t want to damage existing broadcasters- you couldn’t
compete with anything that already existed . . . They wanted you to
contribute to overall Canadian broadcasting in terms of variety and depth of
programming and offer things that weren’t there.”
The predecessor
The Life Network plans to offer
something that isn’t there now but in a way used to be.
A decade ago,
cable’s first crop of specialty services included the Life Channel,
conceived primarily as a venue for health and fitness programming. It had
trouble filling its schedule and broadened its mandate to include a lot of
what’s called, for want of a better term, “lifestyle programming,” and wound
up the video equivalent of those bygone “women’s pages” in newspapers.
“I hate the word
‘lifestyle,’” network president Juris Silkans says, wincing. “It’s so soft
and meaningless.” He was part of the group that put together the old Life
Channel, then watched as it hemorrhaged, losing $7 million in its 12 months
of existence in 1985-86.
“The problem in
those days was that you didn’t have the cable carriage we’re able to get
now,” Mr. Silkans says. These days, “consumers are aware of and familiar
with the extended tier of cable services, which is where Life Network will
be. In the mid-1980s, the whole concept was unfamiliar and, apparently,
overwhelming, which meant it was ignored. There are also more homes wired
for cable. “We had only about 500,000 subscribers. Now, we have a potential
sir million viewers,” he says.
At the time, Mr.
Silkans worked as a vice-president for CUC Broadcasting Ltd. Both it and
Rogers Cable are what’: known in the trade as MSOs — multiple system
operators, companies that own and run a number of local cable systems.
Toronto’s Trillium Cable is one of CUC’s main properties.
CUC had considered
reapplying for a license and trying to get the Life Channel going again
during, the 1988 round of CRTC hearings in which the children’s channel YTV
was licensed. But CUC was committed to getting YTV off the ground, Mr.
Silkans recalls. “So I got assigned to that project instead.”
The phoenix
Even as he worked
with the team putting together YTV’s application, Mr. Silkans held on to the
idea of the Life Channel, trying to think of ways to relaunch the idea
without making the same mistakes. “I opened a file called Project Phoenix,”
he. remembers. “And every year I would pitch the CUC board with the idea of
letting me go ahead with another application.” Finally, in 1990, he was
given the green light, partly because the television landscape had changed.
No longer was the very notion of a specialty channel new. The early channels
that succeeded offered a proven product. ESPN in the United States had paved
the-way for The Sports Network; MuchMusic was MTV with a smaller budget and
a Canadian accent.
More important for
Life Network’s architects, the market for instruction videos had grown
exponentially With VCRs in most homes, more people were learning from
teachers on tape, from exercise to home improvement.
The first task was
to figure out the programming. “I knew the new channel had to be more than
just health-related,” Mr. Silkans says. “We found with the Life Channel we
lust couldn’t do it; there just wasn’t enough there to fill 24 hours a day,
seven days a week.”
To find out what
people want, it helps to ask them. Audience research started in July, 1993.
According to Ms. Brown, the first people questioned were those who watched
TV only occasionally — 10 hours or less a week. Life Network’s researchers
wanted to know why these people weren’t watching and what the medium would
need to do to get them to turn on a set and park themselves in front of it.
“Most of those
people said they didn’t watch television was because TV wasn’t useful to
them,” Mr. Silkans says. “Television had nothing to do with their lives.
When television was launched in the 1940s, the commentators of the day said
it was going to be the greatest force for education in the history of the
world. Certainly it’s the most pervasive medium. But educational? Hardly.
Take Rwanda, or what’s happening in Bosnia. When you watch that stuff,
within two minutes you feel sick. You take that stuff to heart and you’re
depressed by it. Obviously, you need to air stuff like that because people
need to know. But often they don’t watch because it’s soul-destroying.”
Mr. Silkans says
the Life Network aims to even that balance by giving people information they
can apply immediately, in their own lives, for concrete, appreciable
improvement, instead of informing them about a horrible situation, the facts
of -which will likely make them feel either guilty or helpless.
“Research was such
a key factor in the application,” Ms. Brown says. Of the more than $250,000
spent on the application, the bulk was in research. “But we had to prove to
the CRTC there was a demand for the programming, demand for the concept.”
Mr. Silkans says:
“When you add new channels, people don’t watch more television. Most people
watch about 25 hours of TV a week — they watch that much in Canada, in the
United States and in the United Kingdom. And all the research shows that.
people watch no more than 10 channels on a regular basis. And they don’t
really watch channels anyway; they watch programs. When Seinfeld is on, you
don’t really care where it is; you’re going to find it anyway.”
Before research got
rolling, the network — then known as YOU: Your Channel — suddenly lost its
backing from a consortium of cable companies. They worried that the CRTC
would look askance at the arrangement, fearing conflict of interest among
cable companies running a cable channel. Meanwhile, Atlantis Productions —
the company known for producing such successes as Anne of Green Gables and
The Road to Avonlea — had been thinking of putting together a cable service
of drama reruns as a secondary market for its output.
Mr. Silkans
persuaded Atlantis to back Life Network instead: It owns slightly more than
80 percent of the channel, with the rest held by the Interpublic Group, a
holding company that owns advertising agencies.
After finding out
what people didn’t like about TV, Life Network put together a 10 minute
videotape of its alternative: instructional and information shows from which
people could immediately derive some kind of benefit.
Late in August,
1993, after the first two rounds of research — telephone and face-to-face
interviews with the 997 people who had seen the sample videotape — Mr.
Silkans hit on an idea that sharpened the focus of the application and made
it easier both to program the channel and explain it to advertisers and
potential viewers. Life Network would organize its offerings by themes, a
different one for each day of the week:
Monday: “Habitat”
would cover such things as carpentry, home improvement, interior decoration
and various kinds of nest-feathering.
Tuesday:
“Bodyworks” for programs covering health, exercise, preventive medicine and
nutrition.
Wednesday: “Food
Plus,” offering cooking programs, from how to boil a potato to how to
orchestrate a multicourse gastronomic blowout.
Thursday:
“Explorations” for travel of all sorts, from hiking vacations for families
on a tight budget to sleeping one’s way through Europe’s grandest hotels.
Friday:
“Relationships” for patenting, human sexuality, caring for one’s aging
relatives and every kind of human interaction in between.
The weekend
schedule would rerun the best Canadian programs from the preceding week.
“The programming is
in a six-hour block that runs m prime time, from 6 p.m. to midnight.
That’s repeated three times,” Ms. Brown says. All of it would feature 70
percent Canadian content over the broadcast schedule during the first year,
with a pledge to increase that by 2.5 per year up to a constant level of 80
percent.
A weekly schedule
that was so heavily Canadian got some of the most enthusiastic responses
from the channel’s sample of potential viewers. They said they believed they
would likely watch, on average, about five hours a week if such a channel
existed. For people who currently can’t find more than 10 hours of
worthwhile viewing in a week, this was astounding. It convinced Life
Network’s researchers and programmers that they had discovered some kind of
previously untapped ratings motherlode.
The
pitch
In all, the CRTC
received more than 200 initial proposals for new cable services, of which 48
made it past the first cut in December, 1993, and were invited to make a
formal application in person in
Hull, Que., just 10 weeks later.
In that time, Life
Network’s staff had to do all its market research, rough out some kind of
schedule, canvass the production community to find out whether the resources
existed to fill that schedule, then bind all that information into a
proposal convincing enough to be granted the go-ahead by the CRTC.
Jan Platt had come
aboard from Atlantis to work as the channel’s vice-president ,of
programming. Almost immediately, she started a series of 14-hour days
portioned out in 30-minute slices. Each half-hour was devoted to another
group of would-be program suppliers; producers who would make their pitches
for shows for the network.
The CRTC’s hearings
began in March, but luckily for Life Network, it appeared fifth from last.
So it was able to watch more than 40 other hopefuls, benefiting from their
mistakes and learning how to anticipate what the CRTC would ask. To make
sure, there were numerous dry runs in a Toronto
hotel room, with a panel of hostile lawyers asking the most challenging
questions they could devise. “We got five killer people,” Ms. Brown says.
“We developed a whole book of Q&A on potential questions. Then we were
grilled on that.
“We kept refining
and honing the application kept up until the last minute. Toward the end, we
would leave work well after midnight
and roll out of bed at about 5:30
or 6 in the morning to start again.”
“I knew the
application was bulletproof,” says Mr. Silkans matter-of-factly. But one
thing CRTC chairman Keith Spice’ didn’t like was the name, so YOU: Your
Channel (which had already led to much confusion) was junked. After much
discussion of replacements (such as simply Your Channel, the Quality Channel
and the I Channel), it was decided to turn back the clock with the Life
Network.
Getting the nod
from the CRTC means more work for Life Network’s people. Now, they have to
find a building to work out of, sort through hundreds of program proposals
from would-be producers, set up an entire full-time television network’,
from scratch and be ready to roll that videotape on Jan. l. |
