Ovation TV

World Screen Weekly, August 28, 2008

COUNTRY: U.S.

LAUNCH DATE: First available in 1997, Ovation TV relaunched under new management, with expanded distribution, on June 20, 2007.

OWNERSHIP: Hubbard Media Group, together with Arcadia Investment Partners, Corporate Partners II, Perry Capital and The Weinstein Company.

DISTRIBUTION: Almost 30 million homes via cable, satellite and broadband, with carriage agreements in place with, among others, DIRECTV, DISH Network, Time Warner Cable, Comcast and Verizon’s FiOS.

DESCRIPTION: Featuring content on art, culture and personal creativity, Ovation TV’s tagline is “Make Life Creative.” It delivers documentaries, performances and feature films for a multigenerational audience.

SENIOR MANAGEMENT:

Chairman: Ken Solomon

CEO: Charles Segars

COO: Ron Garfield

Executive VP: Chad Gutstein

Senior VP, Programming & Production: Kris Slava

PROGRAMMING STRATEGY: Since its relaunch last year after being taken over by a consortium led by Hubbard Broadcasting, Ovation TV has been keen to expand the definition of what an arts network can be today. “We want to offer our viewers art for the 21st century,” explains Kris Slava, the channel’s senior VP of programming and production. “We’re covering a very, very broad range of anything that any American would call art. It reflects the way ‘Cultural Consumers’ watch, partake of, view art. We don’t just watch classical stuff, we don’t just watch pop stuff, we watch high art, we watch kitschy low art, we consume it all side by side.”

Classical arts—“what you would think of as a traditional, capital A, what I sometimes call Eat-Your-Spinach Arts”—make up the daytime schedule, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Slava says, with opera, orchestral performances, documentaries and more.

Weekday prime time, meanwhile, is organized thematically, kicking off on Mondays with performances: “That is anything you would see on a stage—orchestral, classical and modern dance, opera and theater.” On Tuesdays, the focus moves to artists across the various disciplines, while Wednesdays are devoted to “everything that could be considered a visual art—paintings, sculptures and performance art. We also cover design, architecture, photography, cultural tourism and travel.” Music takes center stage on Thursdays. “It’s a broad eclectic mix of contemporary music, but it tends to be slightly more singer/songwriter oriented.”

While the weekday prime-time schedule is dominated by performances and documentaries, weekends are home to feature films about art and artists such as Henry & June and Topsy-Turvy. Ovation TV also features a branded block on Saturdays called Destination Art House.

Also a highlight on weekends are Ovation TV’s original productions, among them Bonefish Grill’s Notes from the Road, a music series that launched earlier this month. The show is part of the channel’s efforts to work with sponsors, Slava says, citing the appeal to advertisers of Ovation TV’s demographic. With an audience that ranges in age from the 30s to the 50s—with 35 to 40 as the “bulls-eye target”—the demographic “overall is upscale,” Slava notes. “One of the things we’ve seen about the Ovation TV audience is that while all of them may not make $100,000-plus a year, these are the sort of people that will save up their money to get the things they want, whether it’s concert tickets or a piece of art. These are people that are very focused and very discerning in their tastes.”

Whether working with original or acquired content, Slava employs what he calls the “Rosetta Stone approach” to scheduling. “One of the hallmarks of all the people that will watch a channel like Ovation TV is a curiosity and an eagerness to discover new things. [We start by giving them] something that they know and then lead them to another thing they may have heard of more obliquely or always wanted to see but didn’t get to, and then you can lead them to something that is completely new but somehow thematically, artistically related.”

WHAT’S NEW: The channel is looking to continue programming shows around themed strands, such as American Revolutionaries, which featured a diverse range of artists, from Kurt Cobain to Frank Lloyd Wright to Andy Warhol, and Unreal Worlds: The Art of Animation, with films like Spirited Away, The Triplets of Belleville and Tokyo Godfathers. This month, Ovation featured several titles as part of its The Art of War strand, including Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.

Coming up are Everything is Art—“we’re acquiring a lot of stuff on design and architecture,” Slava says—and My Art, which Slava says he is busily acquiring content for, focusing on folk art. November will feature Framed, with programming on the art of photography, and in December Ovation TV will host its annual Battle of the Nutcrackers event, with six different versions of the popular ballet.

WEBSITE: www.OvationTV.com