Multiple Approaches to Multicast Strategy

There’s been a bit of buzz about the various diginet offerings out there, with Bounce TV signing up some big partners in advance of its launch, and the vintage TV offerings, including Me-TV, Antenna TV and This TV, gathering some momentum too.

On Belo’s earnings call yesterday, Peter Diaz, president of media operations, spoke about the group’s strategy of trying a number of different subchannels, including Estrella TV, Bounce, TheCoolTV and ABC’s Live Well Network, to see what gains the most traction.

He singled out the Spanish language channel Estrella as an outlier.

“We’ll wait and see what works well,” said Diaz. “We’re very happy with Estrella. The other ones are working somewhat well.”

We’ve got a story coming out in Monday’s issue in which we look at the subchannel strategies for the O&O groups, including the ABC-owned group’s efforts to sign up more affiliates for Live Well (some stations owned by Belo and Scripps are already on board), NBC’s key new hire for Nonstop, and CBS’s plans to get its own digital channel, called CBS New York Plus, CBS Chicago Plus, etc., off the ground next month.

We also checked in with Fox to see what that group’s plans are with its digital spectrum, and found the O&Os to be pretty active on that front as well.