Fox Cable Adds Turner South
By Mike Reynolds -- Multichannel News, 5/7/2006 8:00:00 PM
The ownership transfer of Turner South has been completed, and some tweaking has begun, but the regional channel’s full transformation won’t be finished until the fall.
FSN South vice president and general manager Jeff Genthner, who last week added day-to-day management of the 8.3 million-subscriber sports and entertainment service, said a name change and a shifting of professional game programming are in the offing for autumn.
Fox Cable Networks completed the buyout — valued at $375 million and first announced in February — and assumed operational control of the network from Turner Broadcasting System Inc. on May 1.
Turner South offers Atlanta Braves Major League Baseball games, Atlanta Hawks National Basketball Association matchups and Atlanta Thrashers National Hockey League contests, plus entertainment-based programming with a Southern sensibility.
Genthner said the new name would not be a variation on “FSN South 2” or “FSN South Plus.” In other markets where Fox runs two regional sports networks, the approach has been to make them quite different — Sun Sports and FSN Florida in the Sunshine State and FSN West and FSN Prime Ticket in southern California.
Genthner said Turner South would remain “hyper-local,” with a mix of 70% sports product and 30% recreational and lifestyle fare reflective of its six-state coverage area.
FSN South, with 11.3 million subscribers, or Turner South’s successor likely would host all of the Hawks games, or all of the Thrashers contests, starting with the 2006-07 NBA and NHL seasons, Genthner said.
Turner South had been the exclusive RSN home to Thrashers games, while FSN and Turner South had rights to 30 and 45 Hawks games, respectively, this season.
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