Cable Network Going After Nesting Market

Dorothy may have been right. There’s no place like home, especially if it’s on TV.

Of the scores of cable channels on the air, Cincinnati-based E.W. Scripps Co. is making this its mantra with the newly launched Home & Garden Television network, a place where the medium and nesting movement come together 24 hours a day.

“Some people live in an apartment, some in a halfmillion dollar home. Yet their common interest is that sanctuary where they live. They want to fix it up and make it better,” HGTV President and founder Ken Lowe said.

“The passion is the same, and the sensibility is the same - improving your home. There is nothing new here. It is the cocooning trend.”

Certainly, programs like PBS’s “The Victory Garden” and “This Old House” and their commercial counterparts have tapped this wellspring for years.

But changing demographics - Americans now spend $260 billion annually in and around their homes, according to the network - and new technologies are making a seven-day-a-week niche network like HGTV possible.

(Spokane’s Cox Cable will carry HGTV on channel 55 beginning on Wednesday.)

Somehow fitting for a brand-new how-to channel, HGTV’s $10 million control center here is still under construction with a field of satellite dishes growing out back. (It’s being filmed for a possible special.)

Nevertheless, the network quietly went on the air Dec. 30 - thanks to an HBO uplink reaching 6.5 million subscribers in 44 markets in 17 states, from New Hampshire to Hawaii, Dallas to Detroit.

HGTV is only now beginning to promote itself because decisions on which markets would receive the network came, in some cases, just weeks before the premiere.

“So what we are getting back are comments from people finding us,” said Executive Vice President Susan Packard, formerly of CNBC. “I mean, we are getting calls from all over the country.”

Ed Spray, formerly with CBS and NBC, was lured out of academia at Syracuse University to join the new network as vice president for programming.

“We decided early on that we wanted to have a variety of programs,” he said.

“If we did all home repair, if we did all gardening … we would look like existing PBS on Saturday morning. We want to have that, but we want to be more than that. This is a lifestyle we are talking about.”

HGTV programming comes in four main categories: home remodeling and fix-it projects; interior design and decorating; gardening and landscaping; and hobbies, crafts and special interests - from sailing to home electronics.

Twenty-seven programs were created to fill the schedule. Some feature entertainers as subjects, such as tours of celebrities’ backyards in “Star Gardens.” Others have celebrities as hosts, including TV weathermen Willard Scott (a home show) and Spencer Christian (wine).

HGTV ordered these programs and owns them. That gives it the immediate advantage of originality and a long-term asset for redistributing their contents as videos, CD-ROMs, transcripts, newsletters, etc.

A vast digital library is planned that one day could be downloaded by an interactive homeowner needing help hanging a door or planting a tree.

Lowe, who conceived HGTV after he and his wife, Mary, suffered through what they thought was “every mistake you can make in building a house” a couple of times over, said the idea isn’t new.

“There were a lot of people who thought this idea would work and was viable. It was just whoever got there first with the money and the wherewithal behind it.”

E.W. Scripps is committing $50 million to the undertaking. The goal is to be profitable in three to five years with 15 million to 20 million subscribers.

Initial advertising support has been encouraging. The network launched with 50 major advertisers.

The first was mower-and-tiller maker Troy-Bilt, which was ready to order spots a year before HGTV had programming to go with them.

“We didn’t want to come out and raise expectations that we have the greatest thing since sliced bread,” Spray said. “We would rather come out with a schedule that surprises people, which I think is happening.

“Now we hope the buzz starts because we are really there. We are a serious contender now.”