TORONTO – The general consensus has long been that in times of economic distress, staying home to watch TV takes precedence over heading to the mall or a movie, so a recession isn’t quite as hard on cable companies and channels, for example, as it is on companies in other sectors.
While this is the first painful recession of the new media age (when home entertainment options are now far more diverse), that cocooning reflex we seem to exhibit when under financial duress seems so far to be holding true and helping according to High Fidelity HDTV co-founder Ken Murphy.
And this time around, people are cocooning with their brand new LCD or plasma high definition television sets. Couple that proclivity for staying home with the fact that high definition television sets still sold very well in 2008, and you have opportunity for a small broadcaster like HiFi.
The three-plus-year-old company owns and operates a suite of four 24/7 HD channels: Rush HD (adventure and extreme sports), Oasis HD (nature), Treasure HD (art and culture) and Equator HD (documentaries). (HiFi sells its own HD content around the world, too.) And, as of last fall when both EastLink and Rogers Cable added the quartet, the channels now have far wider carriage.
HiFi channels have been offered by Bell ExpressVu since their launch and are also carried by some smaller operators such as Source Cable in Hamilton and Sasktel’s MaxTV. Mountain Cable will launch the channels soon, too, said Murphy.
While the free preview period for the four channels with EastLink customers is just ending, Murphy doesn’t yet have customer uptake numbers quite yet, but the anecdotal signs are encouraging, he told Cartt.ca. “We’re hearing there’s very strong demand and we’re starting to get a sense that the economic turmoil in which we all live is causing people to stay home more, spend some family time and look for entertainment value there.
“And certainly, it’s no secret that the HD sets have just flown out of the stores this Christmas… and I’m delighted that more and more of them are actually being lit up with appropriate HD set tops.”
While Murphy and his partners (John Panikkar, David Patterson, Mike McLaughlin) are satisfied with the progress their company has made so far, like any entrepreneur, he wishes progress in terms of carriage had come sooner.
“It has taken us longer to get to market than we wanted… Perhaps we underestimated the bandwidth implications of launching four all-HD channels, so perhaps we’re a year or so later in that process than we thought.” (And to help remedy that a bit – and drive people to the HD channels, the company has submitted applications to the CRTC to be able to offer standard definition versions of its channels.)
However, the programming is catching on. Three of the channels (Treasure, Oasis, Equator) are boomer-focused, while the fourth, Rush, pursues a far younger demographic. “It’s our adventure channel, it’s high octane, edge-of-the-seat kind of big, bold adventure stuff that clearly has a male focus and a younger skew,” says Murphy.
“The other three are explicitly designed for, frankly, boomers… who maybe are a little frustrated by the general trend, if not the overwhelming trend, toward younger demos largely driven by chasing agency dollars… I think a lot of older viewers feel abandoned by broadcasters and they see in our channels programming that’s designed with them in mind.”
And the demo targets of the channels “are clearly working and resonating,” says Murphy.
That doesn’t mean, however, that the programming has been the same since launch or that they don’t think of tweaking it every day.
“I’ll give you a good example,” explains Murphy. “Treasure HD came out of the gate really with a very clear focus on collectors and collecting and the world of art and artists and that’s still a foundation of the channel and will continue to be. But we have added iconic movies to that channel, such as Oceans Eleven.
“Almost every frame in that movie captures a moment in culture long gone with Sammy and Dean Martin swaggering around with butts, drinks, you know, talkin’ about broads and so on in front of the Caddy with the fins. Those sort of, cultural treasures, are working. We’ve added a lot of films and we’re going to be adding even more,” he explained.
Now that the HiFi channels are available in so many more homes than in the past, the company is planning its first mass market consumer media campaign to drive ever more people to the channel – and if their TV carrier doesn’t offer it – to maybe get folks to put a little more pressure on them to add HiFi to their lineups.
Because with people hunkered down at home awaiting an economic turnaround, if they can’t afford to go to British Columbia for some heli-skiing or to see the mysteries of the ancient world without heading to Europe or Egypt, they can at least watch it in HD splendour in their rec rooms.
