Dodgers, Angels Bring Z Channel Into the Majors : Small, Specialized Local Service Finding More Subscribers, More Distributors

With a little baseball, basketball, boxing and astrology mixed into its traditional eclectic menu of movies, the Z Channel, one of L.A.’s oldest and smallest cable services, is finally making it in the big leagues.

Since it added Dodgers and Angels home baseball games to its 24-hour-a-day lineup of movies last April, subscriptions to the long-floundering pay-TV channel have increased nearly 40%. Approximately 110,000 Southern California households subscribe to Z.

But perhaps even more crucial to Z’s future, the number of cable systems that offer the service has tripled recently. And with the channel’s increased access in Southern California, Z Channel executives predict subscriptions will zoom to around 500,000 in three to four years.

“Sports has been the main impetus to getting us on new cable systems and increasing the number of subscribers,” said Susan Packard, vice president of marketing and affiliate operations.

“We’re now offering something the cable operators see as truly distinctive. They always acknowledged the Z Channel as the finest film service, but they used to wonder if it was different enough to appeal to their customers over (national movie channels such as) HBO and Showtime.”

Since its inception in 1974, the Z Channel has been noted for its mix of recent blockbusters, old classics, foreign films and rare archival revivals. But its subscriber base--Hollywood insiders and devoted film buffs clustered primarily on the city’s Westside--had remained steady for several years at about 80,000.

In January, American Spectacor--a conglomerate made up of American Cablesystems and Spectacor, a Philadelphia-based television company that had founded the Prism pay-TV channel in Philadelphia and owner of Hughes Television Network, several sports arenas and the Philadelphia Flyers--merged with Z’s previous owner, Rock Associates. They introduced the idea of a combined sports and movie channel modeled after Prism, which has been successful in blending local sports and movies.

“Big, recognizable home-team sporting events like the Dodgers and Angels and the varied movies we show is an exciting marriage,” said Joseph Cohen, president of Z Channel and founder of the Madison Square Garden network and the USA cable network.

“We think that sports and the great breadth of movies make Z a very special and different product from any of the other movie channels.”

While Packard said that Z was forced to add sports or go out of business, Cohen said winning permission in a court ruling last April to distribute its programming via satellite, thereby making the service available to most cable systems throughout Southern California, saved the Z Channel. Z had previously transmitted its programming via terrestrial microwave.

“But satellite delivery is very expensive,” Cohen said, “so it’s a combination of incurring the additional expense to make the channel available on a wide scale and then giving it a real shot in the arm with the sporting events to make it as powerful and attractive as can be.”

This season Z will carry 35 Dodgers and 35 Angels home games and the service has also begun airing a once-a-month series of boxing cards from Reseda’s Country Club.

This fall, Z will screen Los Angeles Clippers pro basketball games, and beginning this month it will also carry exclusive World Wrestling Federation matches, featuring the likes of Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant, from the L.A. Sports Arena and the Anaheim Convention Center. Cohen is also negotiating for the rights to air Pac 10 college sports and Notre Dame college football games.

Z had hoped to be able to sell advertising during the sporting events. But HBO, which has movie deals with several major film studios, has apparently enforced a provision in its contract with the studios that prohibits them from supplying films to a commercially supported service. The result would be to make movies unavailable to Z if Z sold ads.

Z countered by suing HBO and four film studios for unlawful restraint of trade and is hopeful that the resolution of the suit will enable it to air the commercials (worth a reported $750,000 a year in additional revenue) during its sports programming.

But in an April ruling, a judge denied Z’s request for a temporary injunction that would have allowed it to broadcast commercials during baseball games this season.

Cohen said Z sued HBO and the movie studios because Prism, the only other pay-TV movie and sports channel in the country, has been selling advertising during sporting events and is still licensing movies from all the studios without any complaints from HBO.

Cohen said Z can survive without advertising revenue, but he said the additional money would enable the service to provide more innovative movies and a greater array of live big-time sporting events.

In addition to sports, Cohen said that this fall Z plans to introduce a local music show and, because the astrology page in its monthly program guide has proven popular, an astrology show featuring local astrologers. Cohen hopes this programming will help root the channel in the local scene and further distinguish it from national movie channels.

But even with all of these new programs and despite the death last April of programming guru Jerry Harvey, the guiding force behind the Z Channel since 1980, Cohen insisted the new Z will not tamper with the channel’s traditional mix of new, old and experimental films. Under the new plan, Z will never carry more than 180 sporting events a year, Cohen said.

“We’re committed to programming movies the same way we always have,” said Timothy Ryerson, formerly Harvey’s assistant and now vice president in charge of programming.

“Sure, sports cuts into the time we have for movies, so quite often a particular film won’t be repeated as often as before. It just means that the movie lover has to be a little handier with the VCR.”

Ryerson said Z airs between 17 and 22 different films each week. During the week of July 24, for example, it will screen John Ford’s 1926 silent classic “Three Bad Men,” complete with an original organ score commissioned recently by Z.

That same week Z also will air “Who’s That Girl” starring Madonna, Joseph Mankiewicz’s “The Philadelphia Story,” Luis Bunuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil,” “Stormy Weather” starring Lena Horne, Clint Eastwood in “Heartbreak Ridge,” Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran,” “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” starring Gregory Peck and Ben Kingsley and Glenda Jackson in “Turtle Diary.”

Since relaunching itself as a regional sports and movie service, Z has spent $500,000 in advertising, Packard said. Though most of the ads on Dodgers and Angels radio and in the sports and television sections of local newspapers have focused primarily on the baseball games, Packard said all of the commercials contain some kind of movie message.

Executives at the Z Channel concede that championing the infusion of sports on the service has been a delicate matter. Some hard-core movie fans have bristled at the thought of sports cutting into their movie viewing time and have canceled their subscriptions.

Many longtime subscribers have complained vigorously, especially about the baseball games airing in prime time, just when they were looking forward to watching a good movie.

Packard said, however, that when she explains to these people that invigorating the service with sports was a matter of economic life or death, most of them decide that the movie menu still makes it worth putting up with the inconvenience of a few baseball games each week.

“In pay television, we’re in the satisfaction business, not the ratings business,” Cohen said, pointing out that it doesn’t matter if sports fans watch the movies or if movie buffs also tune in the games.

“I understand the frustration of watching in prime time and finding a baseball game when you wanted a movie. But if we can appeal to X number of baseball fans, Y number of classic movie fans, Q number of foreign film fans, Z number of wrestling fans, we’ll get bigger and bigger.

“We’re going after an accumulation of different audiences that will all be satisfied enough with at least some part of our programming to subscribe each month.”