New Owners Plan to Widen OCN Coverage

The company that is buying Orange County’s cable news channel is planning to expand into Los Angeles, which could create the region’s first 24-hour local news network.

Century Communications Corp., a Connecticut-based cable firm with about 400,000 subscribers in the Southland, agreed this week to acquire Orange County NewsChannel (OCN) from Freedom Communications Inc. The price was not disclosed.

A senior Century executive said Thursday that the plan is to build on OCN’s experience and combine that with Century’s cable subscriber base to create a local news and public affairs cable channel that would appeal to viewers and advertisers throughout the Southland.

It is expected to take three to five years to complete the cable network.

“OCN’s experience tells us there’s a crying need for more quality, up-to-date and more frequent local news,” said William J. Rosendahl, a senior vice president at Century Communications in its Santa Monica office.

Managers at TV stations disagreed, saying the Southland is already saturated with news.

“There’re about 28 hours of local news throughout the day, every day,” said Larry Perret, news director at KCBS-TV Channel 2. “Is there really a consumer demand for more news? I don’t think so.”

Others said OCN’s strength has been its niche market of providing a heavy dose of Orange County news not offered by Los Angeles TV stations. And even then, they said, OCN sustained heavy losses.

However, analysts said a big plus for Century is that any news programming it produces would automatically be available to Century’s existing cable subscribers, instead of having to persuade cable operators to pick up its news programs.

That means that with the acquisition of OCN--which is available to more than 500,000 households in Orange County--Century would potentially start out with a reach of about 900,000 homes.

Bill Marchetti, a cable analyst with Paul Kagan Associates, a media research firm in Carmel, said Century might be able to succeed if it garnered fees from cable systems and kept down the heavy costs of gathering and producing news.

“They would not be profitable if they had to live just on ad revenue,” as OCN has, Marchetti said, noting that industrywide, cable programmers generate 52% of their revenue from advertisers and 40% from licensing fees.

David Augur, general manager of CVI Cablevision in Chatsworth, which has 102,000 cable subscribers in the San Fernando Valley, said he thinks there is demand for more local news. But would CVI pay a fee for it? “That would be solely based on the quality of the product,” he said.

Irvine-based Freedom launched OCN in September 1990. The privately held company has never publicly disclosed OCN’s financial results, but has acknowledged that the cable channel has lost millions of dollars, though executives said the losses had dropped in the last couple of years.

OCN’s programming, produced in Santa Ana in the building of the Orange County Register, a Freedom-owned newspaper, includes news, features and youth sports that focus exclusively on Orange County.

Rosendahl, a Century executive who has hosted numerous public affairs programs on cable, said he did have details on how or whether news would be tailor-made for Los Angeles viewers as opposed to, say, those in Orange County or Ventura County.

Rosendahl said he also did not know whether reporters at the Register newspaper would continue to supply news and host programs on the channel, as they have been.

Register Publisher R. David Threshie said he expected his staff to have a role in the Century-owned cable channel but declined further comment.

OCN is the country’s second oldest local cable news channel. The first, News 12 in Long Island, has been on the air since 1986. Last year News 12 began expanding into other markets in the New York area such as Westchester County, where the company has set up a separate team to gather and produce local news.

Norm Fein, a spokesman for News 12, which is owned by Cablevision Systems Corp. of Woodbury, N.Y., said News 12 generates ad revenue as well as fees from cable affiliates.

Even so, Fein said News 12 has never been profitable, though it has broken even in the last two years.