Pay Television

In a tough year for pay television, the Disney Channel has managed to swim against the tide. The 5-year-old pay TV channel will add at least another 665,000 subscribers this year--more than all other pay services combined. And at only 12% penetration of pay TV homes, there is still lots of room for growth. "Everybody says the pay TV business is a mature business, but I don't see it," says John Cooke, the buttoned-down president of the Disney Channel.

Call it the "Dodgers tax. " Pay-TV analysts expect Guggenheim Baseball Management, the investment group that paid an astronomical sum for the Dodgers, to recover at least part of its investment by charging a sky-high fee for the right to broadcast the team's games. With local stations and cable channels run by Time Warner Cable and News Corp. expected to get into a bidding war for those rights, the team is virtually guaranteed a multibillion-dollar contract - not unlike the one the Lakers won last year from Time Warner.

German media magnate Leo Kirch said he has completed a deal to jointly run the Premiere pay television channel with rival Bertelsmann group, signaling a truce after years of battling over the German pay TV market. Kirch reportedly hopes to link his troubled digital pay TV venture, DF-1, with the more established Premiere, a movie and sports channel that has 1.4 million subscribers. DF-1 has garnered only 30,000 subscribers in its year of operation.

This post has been corrected, as indicated below. It looks like all pay-TV customers in the greater Los Angeles area will be footing part of the bill for removing Frank McCourt from the owners' box at Dodgers Stadium. With Fox Sports West, Time Warner Cable and local stations all competing for the right to broadcast Dodgers games starting in 2014, the odds are good that the team will be able to extract the kind of multibillion-dollar deal that the Lakers reportedly negotiated with Warner last year.

Italians are all set for their first taste of pay television--a cocktail of X-rated movies, sex therapy and what is billed as an erotic version of candid camera. Some 70,000 people have written in to say they want to join the "Pay-TV Italian Club"--open to adults only--and buy the decoder needed to receive the broadcasts for $200. "We won't be a hard-core TV," pledged the station's director, Roberto Artigiani. "You can call it soft erotica if you want," said the 47-year-old Artigiani.

When law graduate Koos Bekker returned to his native South Africa after studying for an MBA at New York's Columbia University in the early 1980s, he went back determined to pass on to his home country his passion for the latest form of electronic entertainment: pay television. Today, Bekker delivers TV channels, mostly by satellite, to 59 countries in Africa, Europe and the Middle East as chief executive of NetHold, the third-largest pay TV group outside the U.S. after News Corp.'

Three of the country's largest telecommunications companies said Friday that they will test-market a high-tech pay-TV system allowing viewers at home to choose what they want to watch from more than 1,000 movies and other attractions. Denver-based cable giant Tele-Communications Inc., American Telephone & Telegraph and regional phone company US West will conduct the test among 450 TCI-affiliated cable subscribers in Denver. It is scheduled to begin this fall and run 18 months.

Howard Stern's raunchy New Year's Eve special looks to be the top-grossing entertainment pay-per-view program of all time, beating out the previous record holder, a 1991 concert by the squeaky-clean pop group New Kids on the Block. Main Events Television, which distributed the "Miss Howard Stern New Year's Eve Pageant," said a final tally will not be available until later this week, but the company estimated that more than 270,000 homes paid an average of $39.

Controversial rap group 2 Live Crew's pay-per-view concert scheduled to be broadcast live Nov. 8 from the Palace in Hollywood has been canceled, a spokesman for the group said late Tuesday. David Chackler, chief operating officer for the group's Luke Records, blamed the cancellation on 2 Live Crew's failure to show up for Monday's scheduled press conference held at the Palace by Choice Entertainment, the firm which was producing the cable broadcast.

Paramount Pictures and Home Box Office on Wednesday signed a multi-year licensing deal that gives HBO exclusive pay-television rights to 85 new Paramount motion pictures, beginning with films released theatrically in May, 1988. Paramount, a Gulf & Western subsidiary, also said it had entered into an agreement with HBO, a Time Inc. subsidiary, to finance jointly an unspecified number of original, made-for-pay-television movies.

The citizens of the Kansas City metropolitan area may soon be watching a Google TV service on a Google TV that connects to the Web using Google Fiber. Google's Google Fiber division filed applications Friday with both the Missouri Public Service Commission and the Kansas Corporation Commission to offer a pay-TV service that would challenge Time Warner Cable and satellite TV services in Kansas City. Read the document: Google applies to offer pay- TV service in Missouri So, you might be wondering, why Kansas City?

Entertainment giant Walt Disney Co. has struck a deal enabling Comcast Corp. cable customers access to all its popular channels — including ESPN, ABC, ABC Family and the Disney Channel — from portable devices and video-on-demand services. The comprehensive 10-year agreement announced Wednesday underscores how entrenched media giants are lining up to protect the decades-old pay-TV business model. Several years ago, entertainment companies were divided on whether to offer some of their most valuable programming free on the Internet, through services such as Hulu, in hopes of attracting younger viewers and advertising dollars.

Looking to capitalize on the burgeoning Asian market, Saban Capital Group and Lionsgate are partnering with a Hong Kong media company to create new pay TV channels and programming. The venture — Celestial Tiger Entertainment — will launch with six channels, including three owned by new partner Celestial Pictures, which boasts one of the largest Chinese movie channels, Celestial Movies, and a large library of Chinese action films. Saban Capital and Lionsgate, Hollywood's largest independent film studio, will contribute the three channels that they jointly own. The two companies began their collaboration nearly two years ago with the formation of Tiger Gate Entertainment.

When the National Football League kicks off its regular season Thursday night at Green Bay's storied Lambeau Field, fans will notice some new rules aimed at making the game less violent. But player safety is not the sole motivation of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. He knows having the best players on the field will keep fans tuned in, which results in billions of dollars in payments from the television networks that carry NFL games. The networks combined pay about $3.1 billion a year for the rights to the 16-game season, up 35% from their last deal.

Reporting from New York — For a long time, the approximately 12 million viewers who subscribe to Cinemax have pretty much known what they were going to get when they flipped to the pay-cable channel after the kids have gone to bed: big-budget Hollywood movies long past their moment and original series, such as "Zane's Sex Chronicles," meant to be watched with the lights out. But if executives at the network have their way, Cinemax will...

It seems like an odd strategy for a company in a mature business with limited growth to buy another with even dimmer prospects. But that's what satellite broadcaster Dish Network Corp. did in April when it acquired bankrupt video store chain Blockbuster in a deal valued at $320 million. Purchasing Blockbuster, and embarking on an almost $3-billion spending spree for broadband spectrum, are part of Dish's ambitious plans to turn the company from a pay-television service with about 14 million subscribers into a competitor of Netflix Inc. and a player in wireless communications.

Spectradyne Inc., the company whose adult films every traveling executive prays do not show up on the hotel bill, is doing a lot of its own praying these days. The leading provider of pay television movies to hotels, which was acquired by investor Marvin Davis last year, is negotiating with its lenders to restructure the company's finances and reduce its heavy debt load.

British Sky Broadcasting, Europe's second-largest pay-television company, is under investigation by Britain's antitrust regulator for possible infringement of competition laws. The Office of Fair Trading said it's investigating the company under the Competition Act that took effect in March, and will focus on BSkyB's wholesale supply of pay-TV.

Summit Entertainment has set a pay-television plan for its post-"Twilight" era, signing an exclusive agreement for its movies with HBO that runs from 2013 until 2017. The Santa Monica independent studio is switching away from HBO rival Showtime: Its current deal to distribute its movies on Showtime expires at the end of next year. The Showtime agreement, reached in late 2008, includes all of Summit's five "Twilight" movies, the last two of which are scheduled to hit theaters in November 2011 and November 2012.

HBO is going mobile. The pay TV network on Monday will begin offering its subscribers access to watch HBO programming on Android mobile devices and Apple Inc.'s iPhone and iPad tablet. "That device has changed television," HBO Co-President Eric Kessler said this week, pointing to an iPad during an interview at the company's Santa Monica offices. HBO hopes the iPad will kick-start HBO Go, the online viewing option for current HBO subscribers that the network launched last year.