HUNTSVILLE – Channel Zero president and COO Cal Millar officially announced a new channel at the CCSA Connect conference on Monday and shifted another to the online world.
While accepting the CCSA’s supplier of the year award at the Board of Directors dinner Monday evening at the Deerhurst Resort, Millar (pictured below) announced that the company which owns brands CHCH-TV, Silver Screen Classics, Movieola and Ouat Media is adding another brand to its stable, dubbed Rewind: Movies Worth Watching… Again.
Movieola, the short film channel, was the first channel the company launched back in 2001 “and it has attracted a loyal, but niche audience ever since, partly because viewers watch a short film and five minutes later, they can flip channels to one of our esteemed competitors channels and still feel like they enjoyed the short film experience,” Millar told CCSA delegates.
However, the company has found that the short film experience is much better suited to an online experience and “in fact, Movieola has been a runaway success in the U.S. for us on Hulu since 2007 and as of December first this year, Movieola will be available exclusively on Hulu in America and as app in Canada,” he added.
Rewind, on the other hand, will take Movieola’s place in most BDUs’ channel lineups that day and “is designed to appeal most strongly to Generation X, those born after the baby boom and throughout the seventies, who grew up in the eighties and became adults in the nineties,” he said. Think Animal House, Beverly Hills Cop and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, for example.
“They are entering their prime parenting and earning years right now and, the research tells us, they are the last great television generation. They are your subscribers, they have cable subscriptions with lots of television, your home phone and robust high speed internet packages. In short, they are a demographic that we want to keep in the cable ecosystem and, we believe, Rewind will help do just that,” added Millar.
Watch Cartt.ca for more on the channel in the coming days.
– Greg O’Brien
