Whittle Buys Into TV for Doctor’s Waiting Rooms

Whittle Communications, which has been considering making commercially sponsored television programs for doctor’s waiting rooms, said Sunday that it has acquired a company that was about to launch such a service.

The Knoxville, Tenn.-based media company said it had acquired Healthcare Television Network, a privately held company based in Tampa, Fla. Healthcare had signed up about 3,500 pediatrician’s offices and a dozen advertisers for a television service. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition increases chances that Whittle will move ahead quickly in developing a closed-circuit TV system of its own, giving advertisers another way to reach a captive audience.

Whittle already has magazines and sponsored posters in about 60,000 health care offices, and disclosed in November that it was considering developing TV programs for waiting rooms.

“We see the purchase of HTN as a real opportunity to quickly expand our waiting-room television project,” said Alan Greenberg, Whittle vice chairman.

Phil Cohen, the 41-year-old chief executive and founder of Healthcare Television, said in a telephone interview that he has been developing the service for about 2 1/2 years and was within a few weeks of launching it.

He said his company had ordered 3,500 television sets and videocassette recorders that were to be distributed to participating waiting rooms. He said the first one-hour program, which included several short segments on topics ranging from sleep disturbance to child-care safety, was ready.

The plan is to have the tapes played continuously in waiting rooms on television sets displayed in custom-made cabinets.

The programming would be changed every three months. Advertisers including consumer products giants such as Procter & Gamble, Bristol-Myers, Squibb Co. and Mattell had signed up, Cohen said.

Whittle’s only other TV project to date is the Channel One news service for use in the classroom, scheduled for launch in March in 1,000 schools across the country. Channel One has been barred from public schools in New York and California and has attracted heated opposition from some education groups because each 12-minute daily news show would include commercials.

One difference between the two systems is that Whittle was planning to distribute its programs by satellite. Whittle also had planned to change the programming more frequently.