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Channel One goes deeper into cable networks

It seems that television, which once attracted not only families but also neighbors to their screens in our country, is switching to working for separate target audiences that differ in both age and interests. Confirming the trend of narrowing “focus,” Channel One recently presented at the 9th international exhibition CSTB-2007 a package of four round-the-clock thematic channels “Digital TV Family.” Programs designed for film buffs (the House of Cinema channel), fans of music videos (Music of the First), documentaries and biographical programs (Vremya), and children of eternally busy parents (Telenyanya) will go to Russian cable networks television.

According to the director of international broadcasting at Channel One, Alexey Efimov, the company has already tested its first developments on foreign Russian-speaking audiences in the USA and Canada, where TV viewers have the opportunity to watch up to 800-900 channels. And the production of Channel One did not go unnoticed there. In Russia, “Digital TV Family” first appeared in the fall of 2006 on the NTV-Plus satellite platform. However, according to experts, the bulk of pay television consumers today are still concentrated in cable networks, covering, according to various estimates, from 2-3 million to 8-10 million households. “Understanding that growth in this direction will be significantly higher than the growth of advertising space in broadcast channels, we are ready to invest heavily in the production of a television product for cable television,” said Mr. Efimov. The director of international broadcasting estimates the time to reach profitability for each of the Digital TV Family channels at three to five years from the date of launch, and the “expected effect,” according to him, will be no less than from the first and second Day Watches, brought in more than $500 million in 2006.

The developers of the new television package for cable television predict that by the end of 2007, the “Digital TV Family” will interest 30-40% of the audience of the main cable networks in Russia, which are today represented by about 600 large operators, and the CIS countries. Such ambitious plans are based on the conviction of the leaders of Channel One that “the majority of thematic channels existing in the cable today are of low quality or use an archival product that is no longer interesting to viewers.” “We have greater material resources than small cable television channels, so we have more opportunities to create a high-quality product specifically for thematic television,” Andrei Efimov told Vremya Novostey. The company intends to focus both on its own production, which today already reaches five hours a day, and on purchasing original programs from third-party manufacturers specifically for the Digital TV Family. In addition, Channel One has the rights to the entire golden collection of the Mosfilm film studio. And the next pretentious film projects of the channel’s general director Konstantin Ernst, perhaps, will also be broadcast on TV for the first time as part of the “Digital TV Family”.

Next year, the company plans to expand the package of thematic channels with five more, since there are “still enough unfilled niches” on Russian pay television. “There is a need in society for children’s television, but when we talk about this audience, we forget that preschoolers and teenagers are already different target groups that watch TV differently,” explained Mr. Efimov. For example, “Telenyanya” is designed for children from three to eight years old, but it is possible that a channel will appear for older children. At the same time, TV people are not afraid to “split” families into competitive target audiences, thereby provoking numerous scandals due to the fight for the remote control - according to their research, every third Russian apartment today already has three televisions.

Yulia KHOMCHENKO