Is there a place for another comedy channel on your cable TV dial? How about if you knew the channel was based in Chicago?
No joke. Two Chicago business executives who made it big by selling their online brokerage firm just before Wall Street’s tech crash, have plans for a new cable channel that would emanate from Chicago’s Near West Side.
Brothers Joseph and Avi Fox on Thursday are expected to officially announce plans to launch Stand-Up Comedy Television, a 24-hour comedy station aimed at Baby Boomers.
The Fox Brothers, who sold their Web Street Inc. to E-Trade Financial Corp. for a cool $45 million, expect to launch the cable channel in January with 3 million customers. They hope to meet a goal of 30 million customers in four years.
That’s a tall order, however. Few cable channels ever survive past the planning stage, usually because they’re underfunded.
Expecting that it will take about $25 million to launch the channel in January, the Fox brothers think they are more than adequately financed for the long haul.
They raised $25 million in investment capital when they started their online brokerage firm and then $50 million more in the markets before merging with E-Trade.
Like Web Street, they believe the new cable channel will fill a niche.
“From a financial standpoint, it’s an opportunity to maximize an underserved market,” said 37-year-old Joseph Fox. “The only other cable channel is young. Comedy Central does great in the 15- to 30-year-old market. After that, they drop pretty quickly.
“We thought there was an opportunity to have something that was cross-generational.”
The Fox brothers have leased about 24,000 square feet of studio space at 1115 W. Washington Blvd.
The entrepreneurs are in good company, sitting across the street from Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Studios.
A key component of the channel will be the set-up of three “studio stages” in Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles, where the channel expects to produce much of its live and taped stand-up segments.
The studio stage in Chicago will operate like a live comedy shop, complete with a regular schedule of acts playing before a live audience.
If successful, the channel could be a major boost to Chicago’s sagging film and production community. Hurt by studios that headed to Canada in recent years, Chicago’s production community has lost jobs and has had trouble attracting out-of-town production.
So far, the Fox brothers’ company employs 11. It expects to employ 50 to 60 by the time of the launch, Joseph Fox said.
But it faces several hurdles. It will have to launch on digital cable or satellite, where the large number of channels dramatically fragments the audience. Such start-up cable channels have difficulty getting enough viewers to sustain them over time, according to media buying experts.
But cable channels successful at attracting niche audiences have better chances of winning sponsors. Coca-Cola, for example, invested $15 million in the fledgling College Sports Network because of the narrow but young audience that Coke wanted to reach.
It’s not clear whether Stand-Up Comedy Television will seek a similar partner. Media observers say that it takes roughly $75 million to $100 million in investment to make a channel profitable.
Fox believes his company can do it for less than $60 million, with help from other revenue sources such as ticket sales to the stand-up clubs.
The company expects that eventually, 60 percent of the programming will be stand-up related, including original stand-up comedy, stand-up game shows and talk shows.
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Advertising at Wrigley: Chicago Cubs marketing executives say that new LED signs in Wrigley Field are not, let me repeat not, permanent signage, and that the park is therefore still signage free.
The fans will likely be the judges of that.
But advertisers in Wrigley will be in heaven this season. New light-emitting diode, or LED, signs will run 70 feet down the right and left field facades. And a new LED sign will run 64 feet underneath the manual scoreboard in center field.
The signs will rotate more statistics on players and give advertisers their largest ever presence in Wrigley. Advertisers will have half-inning exclusivity in the park on the signs.
And though executives aren’t saying so, the new signs are expected to pump several million dollars worth of new revenue into the coffers of the Cubs, which are owned by Tribune Co., as is this newspaper.
“We want to provide more content to the fans. It’s very much content driven,” said John F. McDonough, the Cubs’ vice president of marketing and broadcasting. “We’re upholding the integrity of the park. We opted not to display permanent signage.”
“We needed to update without restructuring the architecture,” said Jay Blunk, the Cubs’ director of promotions and advertising.
Blunk indicated that advertisers jumped at the new opportunity. McDonald’s Corp. and Exelon Corp. were two big advertisers that signed on for the first time. Sears, Roebuck and Co., Culvers, Southwest Airlines, Sportmart and MasterCard International also will have a big presence.
And after a one-year hiatus, Sears will once again have signs in the dugout. In addition, the retailer will have an even bigger presence on field and in the stands as part of its multiyear sponsorship.
All Wrigley personnel, including security guards and ushers, will be decked out in apparel from Lands’ End, a Sears subsidiary. In addition, the grounds crew will sport, of course, Craftsman gear, also a Sears brand.
No one at Sears was surprised at the company’s increased presence at Wrigley. Company CEO Alan Lacy attended every playoff game last year at the Friendly Confines.