Business
Bounce TV goes on air in Philadelphia
The nation’s first free broadcast network targeting African-American audiences arrived in the nation’s fourth-largest media market on Thursday.
Atlanta-based Bounce TV is an over-the-air free channel supported by sponsors and is geared toward black viewers ages 25 to 54. Unlike cable channels, Bounce TV is one of a growing number of networks carried on the broadcast digital signals of local television stations.
Bounce TV executives, among them Martin Luther King III and former Atlanta mayor and U.N. ambassador Andrew Young, said the new network’s targeted demographic is vastly underserved and hungers for positive programming that speaks to them.
“I believe that a network, while its primary purpose is entertainment, can have a balance so that there is information or education, or ‘edutainment,’ that is created by certain content,” King said at a news conference Thursday to publicize Bounce TV’s launch on Lenfest Broadcasting’s WMCN-TV in Philadelphia, ranked by the Nielsen Co. as the No. 4 media market after New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
The popular cable network BET, or Black Entertainment Television, focuses on a 25-and-under demographic with a heavy rotation of hip-hop videos that have alienated many older viewers. The cable networks TV One, owned primarily by Radio One and Comcast, and Centric, a two-year-old BET spin-off, also court the over-25 niche but Bounce TV officials said there is plenty of room for growth, especially in the non-cable realm.
According to Nielsen’s latest annual television audience report, African American households with televisions watch an average of 46.5 hours of TV every week. By comparison, the weekly average is 34.1 hours for U.S. households overall and 29.3 hours for Hispanic households.
Since launching in a handful of markets September 26 with an inaugural showing of the 1978 movie-musical “The Wiz,” the network has made deals with broadcast station groups that include Fox, Gannett, Raycom Media, Belo Corp. and Meredith Broadcasting.
Bounce TV is live or coming to more than two dozen cities including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, New Orleans and Washington D.C. Network executives said Bounce TV is in markets representing more than 70 percent of African American households. Network executives said the name comes from an expression in the African American community to “bounce on over” somewhere, meaning to move forward with energy and enthusiasm.
