Is U.S. Ready for Two 24-Hour Comedy Channels? : HBO and MTV Are Getting Set to Give Us the Giggles Around the Clock

In what may prove to be the Humorfight at the OK Corral, two cable-TV companies here are preparing to launch 24-hour-a-day comedy channels. While both conceivably could survive, many industry executives predict that only one of them will get the last laugh.

The battle pits two of the cable industry’s most successful program suppliers against one another. In one corner: Home Box Office and its Comedy Channel, which is scheduled to be launched this fall. In the other: MTV Networks and its HA TV Comedy Network, which will arrive early next year.

The rivalry extends far beyond the comedy ring. MTV Networks, which operates the MTV, VH-1 and Nickelodeon cable networks, is a division of Viacom International, which also owns Showtime and the Movie Channel, which have long labored in HBO’s shadow among pay-TV services. In May, Viacom filed a $2.4-billion lawsuit against HBO and parent Time Inc., charging that they had engaged in “predatory and exclusionary acts” against their competitors. HBO has termed the suit “totally baseless.”

Though the formats of the two services will differ, the companies cite basically the same reason for developing advertiser-supported comedy channels--that just as there proved to be a market for all-news CNN, all-sports ESPN and all-music MTV, there is bound to be one for a form whose popularity is easily gauged by network programming, motion pictures and nightclubs.

As Dick Beahrs, president of the Comedy Channel, observes, comedy “is probably the last bastion of network programming that has not been fully exploited by cable.”

The idea of 24-hour-a-day comedy may boggle the mind, he says, “but when I first heard of ESPN being 24 hours of sports in 1979, I thought somebody must have been smoking something. And I’m a sports junkie.” ESPN is the nation’s largest cable network, serving 56% of the nation’s homes.

The certainty that viewers could find comedy on TV, regardless of when they switch on the set, is another major selling point, says MTV Networks president Tom Freston, who is overseeing the HA TV effort. “It’s really that constancy, we feel, that’s going to give you enough of an audience to make the thing ultimately profitable,” he says.

Details of what the HA TV Comedy Network and the Comedy Channel will offer are still sketchy, although each says no R-rated fare will appear because each, unlike pay channels where viewers make a deliberate choice to accept such programming by sending in their check each month, is on basic cable and thus available to all cable viewers, young and old alike.

The Comedy Channel seems to be taking a leaf from MTV’s format. It plans to have six to 12 comedy hosts--or “comedy jocks,” as some call them--introducing the material and performing their own jokes too. There’ll be clips of comedy films, classic TV comedy shows, stand-up comedy performances and full-length comedy movies, Beahrs says.

The HA channel, says MTV’s Freston, will offer long- and short-form programming, sketch comedy, stand-up performances and movies and situation comedies either made for HA or bought in syndication. There’ll be no comedy hosts, per se, but there will be new comic personalities on the network. “We see a large role for performance comedy, as we did with rock ‘n’ roll on MTV,” Freston said.

Neither Freston nor Beahrs would say how much their channels will cost to start. But as with other new ventures, they will run in the red for several years and possibly longer.

Freston notes that the cost could be defrayed by co-production deals and even co-ownership of HA TV by other companies. His company is talking with “several” large cable operators about “a possible equity interest” in the new channel, he says, declining to identify them. This might also help circumvent the advantage that the Comedy Channel will have by getting out of the blocks first.

The key question as to cost, says one cable executive, is how much each company will have to pay for what it shows. Original programming is costly, he says, and if they start “bidding against the broadcast market” for recent films, syndicated shows or reruns of network fare, “you are going to run into some very hefty price tags.”

An even bigger problem, however, will simply be getting the new services on cable systems that have become increasingly crowded with other offerings, among them NBC’s business-channel CNBC and Ted Turner’s TNT movie channel in just the past seven months.

While newer cable systems have a capacity for 70 channels or more, the industry average is 36 channels. Older systems are being upgraded, but right now, MTV’s Preston acknowledges, cable “is pretty tight in terms of channel availability. . . . I think there’s a bottleneck existing in terms of channel capacity that’s going to exist for the next couple of years.”

Given that bottleneck, there is doubt in the industry that cable operators can or will want to make room for two all-comedy channels. “My sense is that there’s room for one (cable channel). . . . I don’t see many systems at all offering two,” says Ted Livingston, senior vice president of Boston-based Continental Cablevision, which has 2.4 million subscribers, including 900,000 in the Los Angeles area.

Continental already had sales pitches by executives from HA and the Comedy Channel. “We’ve said to both of them that it’s a concept that makes sense,” Livingston says. However, he adds, “we’ve also said to them that there’s a very low probability that we’d carry two.”

The fact that two channels focus on the same genre doesn’t necessarily mean one has to fail, says Thomas S. Rogers, president of NBC Cable, whose CNBC is still wooing cable operators for channel space. There are multiple channels specializing in movies, business, home shopping and sports. But, he adds, “I would say the likelihood of both (comedy) channels surviving is not great.”

Not everyone agrees. There will always be room for a hit channel, says Bob Clasen, president of Comcast Cable Communications, which is based near Philadelphia and operates or manages systems that serve 2.4 million subscribers. His case in point: TNT started only last October, but its mix of made-for-TNT movies and acclaimed old films already has put it into 49.3% of the nation’s TV households, according to the latest A. C. Nielsen figures.

“I was one of the nay-sayers of TNT and I was wrong,” Clasen says. “With those movies and made-for-cable films, it created a niche for itself almost overnight.”

But the Comedy Channel and HA will be competing for sponsors as well as cable outlets. Richard J. Kostrya, executive vice president of the J. Walter Thompson USA advertising agency, says: “It’s going to be hard to get advertisers to put in major (commercial) schedules to support both networks. It’s just too much.” He notes that in recent years there have been many first-run comedy shows in syndication, “and they have just not been able to generate the audience.”

Beyond that, he says, “from an audience standpoint, I don’t think two can survive. I don’t think there’s a need for two.”