FX Carriage Goes Pedal to Metal
By LINDA MOSS -- Multichannel News, 3/19/2001
The National Association for Stock Car Racing has helped rev up distribution for FX, with three MSOs stepping up rollouts of the service that carries its popular motor-sports events, officials said last week.
Adelphia Communications Corp., Comcast Corp. and Charter Communications Inc. have all escalated their launches of FX, News Corp.'s general-entertainment cable network, beyond the benchmarks called for in their carriage deals, officials said.
"Charter and Comcast are both in compliance with their contracts, but suddenly they did a spurt of launches," said Lindsay Gardner, executive vice president of affiliate sales and marketing for the Fox Cable Networks Group.
In large part, he attributes those extra FX rollouts-as well as new launches on Adelphia systems-to the addition of NASCAR racing to the network's lineup this spring.
FX is now in 60 million homes. With the new launches, it is now tracking to be in from 65 million to 67 million by year-end. That includes about 2 million Time Warner Cable subscribers, with a rollout set for New York City by the end of this year. During the first quarter, Adelphia will add FX to systems that represent from 500,000 to 1 million additional homes, according to Jeff Abbas, the MSO's vice president of programming. That would bring the service to about 90 percent of the operator's 5.5 million subscribers. Adelphia's affiliation deal only mandates that it be carried to about 80 percent of the MSO's homes.
Abbas said he has received requests from general managers at Adelphia systems who want the go-ahead to add the network because of NASCAR.
"Some of our rural system managers have been calling up and asking, 'Can we drop a channel to add FX?'" Abbas said. "There have been a lot of in-bound calls from the field. So we are significantly stepping up our FX distribution, even as I speak."
To make room on analog for FX on those channel-locked smaller systems, Adelphia is, in some cases, moving premium services to digital, according to Abbas.
Comcast is launching FX in Detroit, another big NASCAR town, and Baltimore, Gardner said. And Charter is also ramping up distribution beyond its contract requirements.
"Charter has a lot of systems in the Southeast, which is prime NASCAR territory," Gardner said.
Comcast and Charter officials couldn't be reached for comment.
FX not only has gained NASCAR this year-it will air four Winston Cup races and then Busch Series events on Saturdays-but it's also continuing to increase its original programming. The network last week premiered the second season of its half-hour comedy, Son of the Beach, and this past Sunday debuted the original movie A Glimpse of Hell, starring James Caan.
"It's all coming together under [FX president] Peter's [Liguori] leadership," Gardner said.
In an unusual turn of events regarding another network that is distributed and part-owned by News Corp., Adelphia's corporate office has been getting calls and letters from subscribers thanking the MSO for adding National Geographic Channel to its systems, Abbas said.
"I've had a tremendous amount of positive mail for Nat Geo," Abbas said.
