New nets from Allen, Hubbard?

Staff -- Broadcasting & Cable, 8/28/2000

New cable networks schemes continue to percolate despite the proclaimed dearth of cable bandwidth. Vulcan Ventures' Paul Allen, who built a 140,000-square-foot shrine to Jimi Hendrix in Seattle and owns techtv (formerly ZDTV), is said to shopping around a music channel and developing two or three others.

Trying to get into the cable-programming game for the first time is Hubbard Broadcasting, a TV station-group-owner based in St. Paul, Minn. If it goes ahead with its plans, it will have a distribution head start. According to one source, when Hubbard sold its interest in USSB, the satellite TV company it founded, to rival DirecTV, it came away with the rights to two channels on DirecTV, which now counts 8.7 million subscribers.