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The Boston Globe

By Keith Reed, The Boston Globe

Apr. 27--ImaginAsian TV hopes to find an audience among the many Asian-Americans living in Boston, Si TV wants receptive eyes for its English-language, Hispanic-themed shows, and the Gospel Music Channel thinks there are more than enough Christian viewers here to make its advertisers praise Jesus.

None of them, though, are available on Comcast Corp. cable here despite being carried by the nation's largest cable system in towns like Edison, N.J., and Savannah, Ga. And executives at many new networks say it has gotten tougher in recent years for niche channels to get picked up, despite that digital cable and video-on-demand have given cable systems more space than ever for new channels.

The reason? Networks must negotiate with each of Comcast's 22 regional systems, including the one that serves Boston, for access to a given area. Comcast executives decide at the regional level which channels to carry based on viewer interests and financial benefits to the company, said Comcast spokesman Marc Goodman.

Where a new cable network once could land everywhere a provider operated with a single negotiation, many find that getting a new channel to consumers now requires not only city-by-city negotiations, but navigating between placement on standard cable TV or new digital and on-demand services.

Network executives believe Boston's multiethnic, affluent population could easily sustain many more niche channels. But getting a cable company's approval typically means either waiting around for an answer or, as ImaginAsian did in San Francisco, asking people to write their cable operators asking for the channel.

The strategy worked in that city, said Anil Srivatsa, ImaginAsian's executive vice president of affiliate sales and new business development, but the company hasn't tried to drum up a letter-writing campaign here.

"It's a tremendous amount of sales and marketing and time," said Brad Siegel, vice chairman of the Atlanta-based Gospel Music Channel. Siegel oversaw channels like the Cartoon Network and Turner Classic Movies before launching the gospel channel with Charley Humbard, another cable industry veteran, in 2004.

Comcast completed a $1 billion upgrade to New England lines in 2003, making it possible for the company to add new services like video-on-demand and digital cable -- with space for hundreds of new channels and thousands of archived programs.

Networks on Comcast's standard tier such as MTV and ESPN have bigger audiences and command greater subscriber fees, which can range from pennies to several dollars per subscriber.

That gives cable companies an incentive to put niche channels on their digital tiers, which viewers have to pay extra for, or on video-on-demand, where some network executives say the fees they get are slim to none.

Last year, Comcast started carrying TV Polonia, a Polish-language channel, in the Hartford area because of a high concentration of Polish immigrants there. But TV Polonia isn't on Comcast's popular basic or digital packages. It's sold a la carte, so viewers have to ask and pay extra to get it. Comcast has strongly opposed consumer advocates' push to eliminate tiered cable packages in favor of a la carte programming, but "a small number of channels are popular with a niche audience," Goodman said.

Video-on-demand adds to the complications for nascent networks, said Richard J. Freedman, senior vice president of affiliate sales and marketing for the AmericanLife TV Network, because it strays from the industry's traditional revenue model.

Regular cable networks make their money from fees they charge cable companies to carry them and from advertising sales, which are based on how many people are watching. But cable companies don't want to pay for video-on-demand programming, Freedman said, and fewer people are watching it than regular channels.

"If you don't have any distribution and you have no eyeballs, how do you run your channel?" he said. "I think that's going to hurt the consumer."

Not so, Comcast's Goodman said. Viewers watched 1.4 billion video-on-demand clips in 2005, more than double the 584 million they ordered a year before, he said. PBS Kids Sprout, a network for preschoolers, "started off only on-demand, and it was so popular among customers" it became its own channel, Goodman said.

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