Scripps Networks Targets Asian Growth

At the end of 2008, Scripps Networks Interactive tapped Greg Moyer, a veteran of the international channels landscape, to take its global business in a new direction. As president of Scripps Networks International, Moyer quickly put in place a strategy to take the company’s U.S. brands—which, led by Food Network, HGTV and Travel Channel are leaders in the lifestyle category—to platforms across the globe. 

Less than two years later, Food Network and Fine Living Network have rolled out across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, in partnership with Chello Zone, and Asian expansion kicked off earlier this year with Food Network Asia landing on StarHub in Singapore. Today, the company announced its launch in Taiwan, with Food Network Asia being carried on the satellite platform DishHD.

By the time CASBAA, the annual conference for the Asian multichannel business, rolls around in October, Moyer expects to be able to announce other territories in the region. "We feel there’s a fair amount of momentum in the market right now and it’s a good time to be entering the Asian marketplace," Moyer notes.

Indeed, with an increasing number of platforms switching from analogue to digital and HD becoming a viable consumer proposition, Moyer sees strong potential for Food Network’s Asian rollout.

"By offering the service in both HD and SD, we’re answering the need that some operators have for programming in high definition. I think if you come with a beautifully built channel that’s there in high definition, you may have an opportunity that somebody who just brings an SD product doesn’t have. That’s been a clarifying issue for a couple of distributors."

Moyer is also keen to make sure that Food Network Asia is relevant to Asian viewers, and the channel plans to offer between 20-percent and 25-percent locally commissioned or acquired programming, to sit alongside the properties from the U.S. library.

In the time since Moyer began introducing the Scripps channel portfolio, he notes that he’s been "pleasantly surprised" at the level of brand awareness. "As we had only been doing program syndication for all these years, I was afraid we’d have a lot of education to do to get people to understand that we operate very successful channels in the U.S. Our success, thankfully, has spread quickly and people in the industry know the power of Scripps’ lifestyle brands even though they don’t get to consume them themselves on a daily basis."

That reputation, Moyer says, should go a long way in a region where almost every company that owns a vast library of content is looking to get a channel brand off the ground. "There are a lot of newer services or yet to be defined services that have never actually been channels before. [They may have] great credentials for making TV but they’re not necessarily known as channel builders. Nobody knows if they’re going to be good channels even if they have all this great library material. The fact that we are successfully operating these channels in the United States gives people on the distribution side confidence that the channels we build globally will be equally powerful. So far we’ve been able to demonstrate with our ratings success, primarily in Europe, that that is in fact true."

Pan-regional rollout is one of Moyer’s top priorities for this year. However, with the day-to-day responsibilities for the Food Network Asia business being handled by the company’s director for the region, Hud Woodle, Moyer can focus his energies on the lucrative Indian market. Earlier in the year, Scripps terminated its dealings with NDTV to create a lifestyle channels joint venture in the market. But India still remains firmly on the table. "We fairly quickly found that there are a number of major players in the Indian market that would like to talk to us about potentially replacing NDTV in some sort of joint-venture relationship," Moyer says. "We’re in the exploratory stage. We’ve had extensive conversations with lots of different people, and we’re in the process of assessing our options on how to best enter the market. We continue to remain extremely interested in being in business in India and are fairly confident that we’ll find a way to enter and do it with a partner that helps increase the odds of success."