"Not Intended to Compete With BET or TV One"
Robert L. Johnson became a billionaire when he sold BET.Robert L. Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, has asked the Federal Communications Commission to approve plans for a new "urban" television network that would cater to a multicultural audience interested in health, lifestyle, education and other issues, a spokeswoman for Johnson told Journal-isms on Tuesday.
Johnson is joined in his application by Ion Media Networks, Inc., which describes itself as "a network television broadcasting company which owns and operates the largest broadcast television station group in the U.S., as measured by the number of television households ION's stations serve."
The new network is "not intended to compete with BET or TV One," Johnson spokeswoman Traci Otey Blunt said. Plans are open and no staff members have been hired, awaiting FCC approval. The network might even produce news programming, she said. The FCC is not expected to act until winter or early spring, after a period of public comment.
The new company is to be called Urban Television LLC. Johnson is seeking permission to share time on stations owned by Ion, which "was born in 2006 out of the ashes of Pax TV, whose guiding genius Bud Paxson spent the previous decade buying up UHF TV stations for use as the linchpin of a family-oriented broadcast network," as Variety reported in September.
Sharing time on the Ion stations is possible with the advent of digital channels, John Lawson, Ion's executive vice president for policy and strategic initiatives, told Journal-isms.
Unlike in previous decades, when "shared time" meant a second radio station might broadcast on the same frequency at night, today the stations simply share different audio channels on the same frequency; so that a second network could broadcast 24 hours a day. The "shared time" concept was originally created to boost minority access to the airwaves, Lawson said.
"Urban, a new entrant in the broadcasting industry, intends to use the newly
licensed, share-time stations to launch a new programming format, including
informational and issue-focused programming that is targeted to serve the needs and interests of African-American viewers and other underserved members of the 42 communities that are the subject of these applications," the request to the FCC says.
Johnson's company would own 51 percent of the new venture and Ion 49 percent.
The plans for the urban channel, first reported on Tuesday by TV Newsday, grew out of talks between Johnson and Brandon Burgess, chairman and CEO of Ion Media Networks, Lawson and Blunt said.
"Burgess, who shows faint traces of a German inflection in his voice from his upbringing and education in Germany, is eager to get back into the competitive game after two years of what he calls 'a transition strategy' at Ion (formerly Pax) of filling the network's schedule with inexpensive older series including 'Mama's Family,' 'Baywatch,' 'Wonder Years' and 'Quantum Leap,'" John Dempsey wrote in his September Variety story.
"Not surprisingly, few people are clamoring for this programming lineup; for the first eight months of the year, only 444,000 viewers, on average, watched Ion TV, which dragged it below the ratings of such cable networks as Animal Planet and Lifetime Movie Network."
Johnson, who founded and then sold the Black Entertainment Television network to Viacom for $3 billion in 2000, now owns the Charlotte, N.C., National Basketball Association franchise, the Bobcats.
"As Mr. Johnson tries to recast himself as a mainstream business mogul, his calendar has become very crowded, thanks to a high-powered push to start and buy several companies. That spree has produced a sprawling portfolio of properties, including a hedge fund, a private equity firm, a chain of more than 100 high-end hotels, several commercial banks and savings institutions, a film company and several gambling ventures," Ron Stodghill wrote last year in the New York Times.
“My tombstone will read: ‘This is the guy who aired rap videos,’ ” Johnson said in that story. “But you know how I deal with that? I put it where it belongs, which is in the pretty-much-irrelevant category.”
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