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“The trick is to
acquire thematic
channels with
as big a niche
as possible.”
Brent Harman Managing Director
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venture was with BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm - was an arduous process, a real trial at times. But once there, the BBC was extremely enthusiastic about getting these channels underway and sup- porting them as we are.”
So 1998 was the first full year of operation for the partnership. In addition to UK Gold (along with com- panion Gold Classics) and UK Style, this offers UK Arena (emphasising art and design), UK Horizons (nat- ural history) and, most recently, UK Play, which broad- casts music and comedy round the clock. Also on the move from elaborate website to fully-functional inter- active/transactional channels are Flextech innovations in travel, home shopping and, as in the case of Scene One, a comprehensive entertainment guide.
The name of the game is “niche”. Or as Flextech - whose 70s’ origins were as a technology service supplier to the oil industry - likes to call it, “themat- ic” channelling.
“The trick,” says Harman, “is to acquire themat- ic channels with as a big a niche as you can get. I don’t, for example, believe there is as yet any great demand for a Fairisle knitting jersey channel. Is there a finite number of channels the UK can absorb? The answer’s probably yes, but what it is I don’t know. What I’m suggesting is that for the same amount of money in the future you will get much more. Each viewer may only watch a dozen channels of choice but each may have a different dozen. In some ways, it’s no different to the magazine world. We don’t all want to read, say, Cage Bird Monthly, but its publish- ers still enjoy a nice little niche business.”
Neither sport nor movies seems to play a part in Flextech’s current strategy but he wouldn’t rule out some involvement in one or both in the near future.
And as for that
future? Says Harman,
“We’re an interesting
beast now, rather
akin to a ground
cover plant. We’ve
tried to cover off
quite a lot of the gen-
res and demograph-
ics that are out
there. The effect of
all that is we’ve become the biggest supplier of basic channels to the market. It means that others now come to us to launch channels and others already in the business who want to strengthen their positions are also talking to us.
“I think that over the reasonably short term future, say the next two to three years, we will aggre- gate more channels under the Flextech umbrella. The strategy almost from the day I arrived was the more channels you can lever off a number of centralised functions then the less cost there is to each channel.
“One of the attractions of working under our umbrella is the economy of scale we’ve achieved.
Look at our building [in Great Portland Street], it’s a temple to scale in that we have all the channels operating out of here, including the BBC ones. Yet we have just one finance depart-
ment, one research resource and one big advertising sales house that now sells for all our channels, plus the Discovery channels.”
A year into digital, it’s likely we ain’t seen noth- ing yet. Says Harman: “I don’t think we’re ever going to get sick of being offered more choice. We might get sick of being asked to pay more for it, but that’s not the case. Take movie ticket prices: they haven’t increased significantly. Today we go to see movies that cost a lot more but we’re not being asked to pay more to see them. It’s the same in multi-channel TV. We’re not being asked to pay more, we’re just being offered more.” ■ QUENTIN FALK