Country Comes to Cable

By Richard Stengel

The Nashville Network resounds with down-home sounds

With a whoop and a holler and a dash of down-home glitter, country music strutted onto cable television last week. The Nashville Network, a joint venture from WSM Inc. of Nashville (owners of the Grand Ole Opry) and Group W Satellite Communications, was beamed into some 7 million homes via 725 cable operators. It was the largest subscriber launch in the history of cable television. The inaugural evening featured five hours of live music by such country stars as Tammy Wynette, Emmylou Harris and Tanya Tucker as they sang at kickoff parties round the country. The Nashville Network, according to Industry Analyst John Reidy, "looks to me like one of the best ideas I've seen in quite a while for advertiser-supported cable."

TNN's debut, following the demise of the Entertainment Channel and CBS Cable, comes at a moment when cable industry analysts are circumspect about the immediate future. But the folks at WSM and Group W are bullish about the prospects for the Nashville Network. WSM has bet $50 million that America's growing army of country music fans will make the network profitable within three years.

Advertisers apparently share that optimism; the network has already lassoed such big league sponsors as Kraft Foods, Levi Strauss, Ford, Sears and R.J. Reynolds. "We launched TNN on Monday with 20 advertisers," says Dan Ruth, a spokesman for Group W. "We sold all the time we had." The going rate: $800 a minute. According to Robert Alter, president of the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau, an industry trade group, "There's a very definite market for country music, and the market is probably more universal than people suspect."

The Nashville Network may avoid the identity problem that plagued the Entertainment Channel. Says Analyst Mike Dann: "It is as specialized as a news channel, a weather channel or a financial channel." Its theme is the world according to country. Its 18 hours of daily programming boast a cornucopia of country culture: 30 minutes of live music a night on Nashville After Hours; 1-40 Paradise, a country comedy set in a Tennessee truck stop; Dancin' U.S.A. (watch rhinestone cowboys do the "Cotton-Eyed Joe"); Fandango, a quiz program testing contestants on their knowledge of country trivia. Unlike MTV, which is essentially a video jukebox featuring rock video clips, the Nashville Network has a menu of original programming along the lines of a full-service network.

A possible hitch for TNN is that it is beamed from Westar V, a relatively new satellite that is picked up by fewer cable operators than RCA's Satcom III-R. With its almost 40 hours of original programming a week, TNN will have its hands full keeping production costs down. Still, country and cable seem like a good match. For one thing, they share the same rural roots. Indeed, an advertising slogan for the new network claims that it is a service "for people who really love their country." Music, that is. --By Richard Stengel This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.