Starz Makes Changes to Encore Offerings

BEVERLY HILLS: Starz has replaced some of its existing Encore offerings with new channels geared toward African-American viewers and the Baby Boomer generation; the premium pay-TV service also added a new horror block and has moved Encore Español to a lower tier.

Encore Black, which replaces Encore Drama, will offer commercial-free premium content in HD for the African-American community. TV titles will include Martin Lawrence's 1st Amendment Stand Up, What's Happening!!, Diff'rent Strokes, 227 and Amen, while movies will include Unbreakable, Losing Isaiah, Freedomland and One Eight Seven.

Replacing Encore Love is the Baby Boomer-targeted Encore Classic, which will feature such shows as Murphy Brown, Magnum P.I. and Night Court. It will also include a selection of films, such as Kramer vs. Kramer, American Graffiti, Independence Day, Breaking Away, Stand By Me, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Good Will Hunting, Tootsie, Basic Instinct and The Notebook, among others.

Also new from Starz is Encore Suspense, a horror-themed programming block slated to air every night at from 9 p.m. to approximately 5 a.m. Titles will include Night of the Living Dead, The Fly, Silent Night, The Amityville Horror, The Dead Zone, Resident Evil: Retribution and Frozen.

In addition, Encore Español has been placed in a lower tier. The Latino-skewing network will be offered to multichannel video distributors in the U.S. for lower-cost Spanish-language channel bundles. It will present the U.S. television debuts of Ecuador's Sin Otoño, Sin Primavera, Argentina's La Llamada and Colombia's Lo Azul del Cielo and Estrella del Sur.

All changes are scheduled to take effect on Monday, December 2.

"The new and improved Encore family of channels and services are aligned to super-serve its many constituent demographic groups," said David Baldwin, the executive VP of program planning for Starz. "Growth in Latino and Boomer populations and continued over-indexing in TV usage by African-American audiences created marketplace opportunities for us to add incremental consumer value to the ENCORE services. Along with the new nightly horror block, these enhancements will benefit Encore subscribers for years ahead. Encore truly is 'Playing Favorites' with these improvements to the channels and the Encore On Demand and Encore Play services."