Backchannelmedia

Forbes

Anyone can start a cable channel in the digital age. Convincing the cable guys to put it on TV is a lot tougher.

Lawrence Kasanoff want more energy. "Kid around, have fun," he implores "Kung Fu Karen," a petite brunette dressed in tight jeans and a revealing shirt. "We're live in Bangkok, Thailand," she repeats in front of a camera, followed by multiple takes of "We're live in Tokyo, Japan."

Kung Fu Karen is nowhere near Bangkok or Tokyo. She stands in front of a blank green screen in a cramped room off a Santa Monica, Calif. alleyway. One of a small harem of "fight jocks," she's taping promotions for Kasanoff's fledgling startup cable channel, Blackbelt TV, which touts "kicks, flicks and chicks" (or "chicks and flicks, guns and buns," as Kasanoff once told a reporter). The "kicks" are martial arts matches from around the world ("chop socky," in Hollywood jargon). The "flicks" are classics of the genre that includes The Karate Kid and Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon.

But after $10 million and years of trying, and despite an accomplished career as a Hollywood producer on such hits as Mortal Kombat, Terminator 2 and True Lies, Kasanoff has yet to secure a full-time channel slot on any big cable system. Although he's touting a recent "distribution agreement" with Comcast, the deal only gives Kasanoff the right to separately pitch Blackbelt TV to the hundreds of independently run cable systems that make up the Comcast empire. None have signed up so far, according to Comcast.

In the meantime he's had to endure multiple rejections, the bursting of the Internet bubble for which he created the mini- network in the first place and sparring matches with at least four competitors pitching similar martial arts channels. He spent more than a year, and an undisclosed amount in legal fees, to convince a judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed against him by one of the competitors, who accused Kasanoff of infringing on use of the name "Blackbelt." The other guy, Erik Jones of Los Angeles, calls his network "Black Belt TV" with a space in the name, and claims he used it first.

"I met so many people who said, 'Look kid, you gotta pay your dues,'" says Kasanoff, 45, of his meetings with cable bosses. "They said, 'We want to see you fight.'"

But Kasanoff's larger problem is that he's trying to launch a new network in the midst of a battle over scarce digital bandwidth that pits powerful programmers against cable companies. The end result, at least according to the cable companies, is that the five big programmers--Fox, ABC/Disney, CBS/Viacom, NBC/General Electric and Time Warner--use the muscle of popular networks such as ESPN and MTV to tie up most of the available channel space with seemingly endless spinoff networks, whether or not viewers are even watching.

That leaves little to no space on most cable consumers' basic bundle of channels, the most desirable real estate for both upstarts and the programming owned by the cable companies themselves. Comcast owns four channels, and Time Warner, the nation's second-largest operator behind Comcast, owns seven, including CNN and the myriad Turner networks.

"These five big guys control darn near the universe," says Bennett Hooks, chief executive officer of Buford Media Group, which operates 69 cable systems in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and Arkansas. "They're literally eating up our bandwidth."

The roots of the dispute go back to the Cable Consumer Protection & Competition Act of 1992, which applied something called "retransmission consent" to the cable industry. The legislation was benignly designed as a way to ensure that broadcast stations would be compensated for the retransmission of their programs on cable. But retransmission consent has since morphed into the bludgeon used by media conglomerates to ensure their ancillary cable networks get favorable distribution in exchange for allowing cable companies the right to use their network affiliates' broadcast signals.

As a result, 38 of the 50 biggest cable networks, including ESPN (ABC/Disney), Nickelodeon (CBS/Viacom), Fox News (Fox) and USA (NBC/ GE) are now owned fully or partially by broadcasters or big cable outfits. Ben Hooks claims he's so bottled up with the conglomerates' programming that he can't add new Spanish-language programming in his growing Hispanic markets, much less an outsider like Larry Kasanoff's Blackbelt TV.

"This was originally supposed to protect over-the-air broadcasters, but it's become the law of unintended consequences," says Hooks, who testified about the issue before Congress last summer. "It has mushroomed into something ugly."

Despite the near-impossible odds, some 60 channels are petitioning cable companies for distribution, including Shalom TV, Africast Television Network, the Wine Network and the Puppy Channel. Good luck, says Matthew Polka, a former cable operator and president of the American Cable Association, a trade group that represents smaller cable companies. The unaligned upstarts, says Polka, "won't be carried unless they can survive long enough to get absorbed by one of the giants."

Kasanoff's cable ordeal was inauspiciously birthed during a chance encounter in 1996 while casting martial arts fighters for the sequel to Mortal Kombat, his hit movie based on the gory videogame. Attending a kickboxing match in Bangkok he asked the Thai TV producers who were filming the event what they did with the footage after it aired on local television.

Nothing, it turned out. Kasanoff asked if he could license it. "I just thought the appetite for this was insatiable," he recalls. "Maybe I could do a TV network."

But distracted by producing the movie, Kasanoff put the idea aside. He still continued to amass what he now says are rights to 20,000 hours of martial arts programming. To air the footage would cost just $10,000 to $15,000 per hour, he says, compared with as much as $2 million to create a new network show.

Kasanoff rekindled his idea in 1998. This time he bet on a vision that the fledgling broadband pipelines of the Internet would merge with the fiber-optic lines of the cable companies, allowing Internet entrepreneurs to create mini digital networks.

So he recreated his martial arts network as an Internet portal. On the chance the karate flicks wouldn't attract enough eyeballs, he went back to his roots as a B-movie producer of such cheese as Blood Diner, Slaughter High and Street Trash by creating a sort of guy portal. Among the featured attractions, "Bikini Masterpiece Theater" and "Are Those Real?" asked viewers of photos of women whether their breasts were "Silicon City or the real deal."

But when the Internet bubble burst his dreams for a broadband network, Kasanoff abandoned everything except Blackbelt TV. Rechristening the site as a cable channel in September 2002, Kasanoff planted stories in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and laddie book Maxim, which ran a four-page spread of the fight jocks in outfits that left only a little to the imagination.

Kasanoff admits he did everything backward by going after content first, then distribution. He locked up rights to more movies and shows from Sony, News Corp. and Universal Studios. Then he hired a sales and operating staff to run the network. He figured it would take just six months to get on cable, a year at most. "At heart I am 100% a producer," Kasanoff says in his office in a light industrial section of Santa Monica, across the street from a Salvation Army outpost. "It's all about the content. I knew they'd love it."

For the first year he banged on doors and was told to come back the following year. He made multiple unreturned calls and sent sample tapes featuring prominent displays of the comely fight jocks. He even mailed around a sound-activated promotional gimmick featuring dancing hamsters suited up in martial arts regalia.

"It was an unbelievably difficult time," he says. He got through to cable bigwigs such as Comcast boss Brian Roberts, but the response was always the same. "They said, 'Kid, we want to wait you out two years to make sure you can stay in the game.'"

Kasanoff admits he slowed down the process by insisting on owning the venture, in contrast to many upstart cable networks that sell out to the big programmers or cable outfits as a way of gaining distribution. Example: Brian Bedol and Steven Greenberg sold out to ESPN two years after founding the Classic Sports Network in 1995. They're now back with the new College Sports Television network featuring a desultory mix of anything the big broadcasters haven't locked up. Bedol and Greenberg may not remain independent for long this time, either, if they even survive. ESPN is planning its own college sports network next March.

"It's hard to launch a cable network," say Bedol and Greenberg through their flack. The two are also minority investors in Blackbelt TV.

But if Kasanoff is scraping along, his competitors are having an even tougher time. New Jersey martial arts promoter R. Anthony Cort claims he's been peddling his Martial Arts Channel since coming up with the idea in 1996. Cort says he'll offer more health and fitness shows instead of Kasanoff's chicks and kicks.

Erik Jones of Black Belt TV, the chap whose lawsuit against Kasanoff was dismissed in October, claims in an interview that he was set to launch in November on cable systems covering 14 million homes. "He's trying to steal my network," complains Jones.

It may have been the other way around, according to the California U.S. District Court judge who granted Kasanoff's request for a summary judgment. Jones couldn't provide any evidence other than assertions that he had been using the name since 1985. The judge noted in his order that Jones did cease using the name "at any martial arts tournaments" between 1990 and 1992, when he was otherwise occupied at state prison following convictions for theft and receiving stolen property.

Jones' attorney helpfully offers that Kasanoff's own lawyer filed a motion to quit the case because Kasanoff didn't pay him. "It was a billing dispute," responds Kasanoff's flack.

"You can't hunt buffalo without arousing a few mosquitoes," shrugs Kasanoff about his competitors. "There's no one else who is real. It's annoying."