Aug. 31, 1984: MuchMusic is launched on Canadian cable. Teenagers sit glued to their TVs, watching an entirely new form of television. But they’re not the only ones whose lives are being changed – launching Much vaults CHUM Television from the local Toronto stage to a national presence.

It’s been 20 years since CHUM introduced Much, its first specialty. Since then, the broadcaster has become a major player in the analog and digital specialty spaces, launching services based on genres that already figured prominently in its Citytv programming: the arts (Bravo!), science fiction (SPACE: The Imagination Station), sex (SexTV: The Channel), and news (CablePulse24).

In fact, with further specialties covering books (BookTelevision: The Channel) and fashion (FashionTelevisionChannel) and additional music services (MuchMoreMusic, MuchVibe, MuchLoud and MuchMoreRetro), what started as a speculative venture 20 years ago has today become a prime focus at CHUM Television.

Today, CHUM’s specialties are a mainstay of Canadian cable and satellite TV. But getting carriage for MuchMusic in the early days was no slam-dunk.

To make it happen, ‘Ron Waters [now vice chairman of CHUM’s board] and I worked the phones in a 10-foot-by-10-foot room along with a cable rep and a receptionist,’ says David Kirkwood, CHUM Limited’s EVP of sales and marketing.

What really made the difference was when MuchMusic was ‘packaged with TSN and First Choice [now The Movie Network],’ Kirkwood adds. ‘This packaging worked – by the end of the year, we had hit one million subs. That was a very big deal.’

Selling ads on Much proved easy right from the start.

‘So many advertisers were accustomed to working with MTV that we didn’t have to convince them to advertise on MuchMusic,’ says Kirkwood. ‘Their willingness to buy resulted in great sales, and made me quite the hero with my bosses!’

Despite the success of Much, it wasn’t until 1995 that CHUM launched its second specialty, the ‘NewStyleArtsChannel’ Bravo!. By then, MuchMusic had become a Canadian institution, reaching seven million households. (First offshoot MuchMoreMusic started up in 1998, skewing older.)

But Bravo! didn’t have as easy an entry into the broadcast world. Even before it launched, CHUM endured criticism from supporters of the CBC and National Arts Centre, each of which wanted an arts channel of its own.

‘Some people referred to us as the ‘dirty rock ‘n’ rollers’ because of MuchMusic,’ laughs Paul Gratton, VP of Bravo! and VP and GM of SPACE and Drive-In Classics.

Despite the insults, critics were right in assuming that Bravo! would be a different kind of arts channel. For one thing, it began making money in the second year of operation and has done so ever since – no mean feat for any arts channel.

‘Our success lies in taking the principles that worked with MuchMusic and applying them to the higher arts,’ Gratton says. For instance, you won’t see critics talking at length on Bravo!, and only the occasional two-hour opera appears in its programming mix. Instead, ‘Bravo! is all about promoting the artists we cover,’ says Gratton.

‘We do this with our Bravo!FACT shorts – six-minute shorts done by Canadian artists from all media, which we commission on a non-profit basis,’ he continues. ‘We schedule these shorts around ratings winners such as Sex and the City. This gives Canadian artists a chance to be seen by hundreds of thousands of people, rather than the 30,000 to 50,000 who would tune in to conventional arts programming.’

Two years after Bravo! hit the airwaves, CHUM inaugurated SPACE: The Imagination Station, since known to some as ‘the station that Captain Kirk built.’

As the first channel to broadcast all four syndicated Star Trek series – Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager – SPACE’s debt to Gene Roddenberry can’t be overstated. Even today, SPACE’s four-hour Star Trek block ‘remains extremely popular,’ says Gratton. ‘When new episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise are aired, our ratings go through the roof!’

This said, SPACE has also been the home of six Canadian-made sci-fi shows, he notes. ‘We were the home for Lexx and First Wave, and now air Stargate SG-1.’

As for ad sales? Perhaps to the surprise of many, SPACE’s Star Trek audience is skewed 54:46 to female viewers, ‘which offsets the male-skewing audiences for many of the other shows on SPACE,’ says Gratton. One of these viewers is Gratton’s wife, ‘who is a huge Trekkie,’ he says.

Following the successful launch of SPACE, CablePulse24, the Toronto-based 24-hour news station, hit cable and satellite in 1998. One year later, Star! The Entertainment Information Station arrived.

Then, on Sept. 7, 2001, CHUM launched seven digital specialty channels: FashionTelevisionChannel, BookTelevision: The Channel, CourtTV Canada, Drive-In Classics, SexTV: The Channel, MuchVibe and MuchLoud. Two years later, MuchMoreRetro (an ’80s-’90s music video network) began service.

With its current roster of analog and digital specialty channels, CHUM now competes in a very crowded television universe. Moreover, the advertisers that pick and choose among these channels have become far more selective and, one might say, even stingy with their dollars.

‘Twenty years ago, advertisers bought specialties because they wanted to be in certain environments,’ Kirkwood says. ‘Today, that’s all changed. It’s all about media efficiency – get the most eyes for the money.’

In this market, brand extensions matter, especially in the case of the MuchMusic spin-offs.

‘In the early days of MuchMusic, we played a classical video followed by a country video followed by a rock video, and people didn’t mind,’ says David Kines, VP and GM of MuchMusic, MuchMoreMusic, MuchLoud, MuchVibe and MuchMoreRetro.

‘However, as viewers became more sophisticated and the music video genre took hold, we realized that we couldn’t play Celine Dion and Our Lady Peace on the same channel,’ he continues. ‘Like radio, this led us to create specialized music channels, each one targeted to a specific musical taste.’

In this brave new world, making money isn’t always easy. CHUM’s analog stalwarts are doing fine, but its digital channels are overall just starting to make a small profit, according to the broadcaster. This problem is common to all of Canada’s digis, simply because their audiences are small, as digital penetration still has a lot of room to grow.

Still, CHUM is committed to the digital space, says Kirkwood, as it sees the digis as a long-term growth area and because it doesn’t want the competition to claim this ‘beachfront property.’

Overall, 20 years in the specialty channel market has been time and money well spent for CHUM Television, especially because CHUM Television International has been able to resell much of CHUM’s specialty programming to broadcasters worldwide (see story, p. C-17).

‘It’s been a great ride, and we’re looking forward to more,’ says Kirkwood.