Glenn Beck Begins Campaign to Urge TV Systems to Add His Web Channel

Glenn Beck is beginning a campaign to get his Internet channel, TheBlaze, onto cable and satellite television systems across the country, and the one system that already carries the channel, Dish Network, is backing him up.

The campaign will begin on Monday when Mr. Beck starts promoting GetTheBlaze.com, a Web site that asks fans to contact their television provider and request the channel. He will talk about the site on his nationally syndicated radio show and link to it on his social networking Web sites.

“You probably pay good money every month to your TV provider for access to channels like MSNBC and Al Jazeera America â€" channels that you might not watch, or even agree with,” Mr. Beck wrote in a letter on the Web site. “Adding TheBlaze will ensure that you and your family have a source of news and analysis that you can trust and that doesn’t betray your values.”

Mr. Beck has previously indicated that he plans to position the channl as a libertarian news and entertainment source, thereby coming into relatively direct competition with Fox News Channel, where he hosted a hugely popular 5 p.m. talk show for nearly three years. The plan is rather audacious, partly because TheBlaze is owned by Mr. Beck’s company, Mercury Radio Arts, not by a media conglomerate like Fox’s parent, News Corporation.

Twenty months ago Mr. Beck left Fox and started GBTV, the subscriber-only Internet channel that he later renamed TheBlaze.
Within a year he had 300,000 subscribers, no small feat for any Web site. But by then he’d also decided he wanted to get back on old-fashioned TV. In ! September 2012 Mr. Beck announced a carriage deal with Dish, the first of what his company hoped would be many such deals. Simply stated, the economics of television are better â€" TV channels get small per-subscriber fees, whether or not the subscribers ever watch, and the advertising possibilities are enormous.

Dish has a period of exclusivity with TheBlaze, so no other cable or satellite system can carry the channel quite yet. The companies haven’t disclosed how long this period lasts, but it is probably ending soon, because TheBlaze is starting its campaign now. Such campaigns are attempted all the time by small, independently-owned channels, often with little success. Ordinarily cable and satellite systems are reticent to carry new channels; in fact, the trend is in the other direction, toward dropping independent channels altogether.

But what Mr. Beck has â€" and wat other small channel owners don’t have â€" is an audience of millions on the radio and on the Internet. And some help from the Dish Network. In a statement provided by a spokesman for the channel, Dave Shull, the Dish senior vice president of programming, said, “TheBlaze and Glenn Beck bring a unique perspective to Dish’s broad spectrum of political programming on all sides.” When the channel was added last fall, he said, “We had customers sign up quickly, and we saw new customers join Dish. In fact, subscriptions attributable to TheBlaze outpaced our projections by 80 percent, proving that Dish is giving customers what they want with a choice in programming, not to mention the technology to choose how to watch it.”

Even with Dish’s endorsement, it remains to be seen whether other cable and satellite systems â€" such as DirecTV, Comcast and Time Warner Cable â€" will agree to carry TheBlaze. They may simply point out that viewers can find it on the Internet.

A spokesman fo! r TheBlaz! e did not immediately comment on whether the subscription channel would be taken off the Web as a condition of gaining carriage on television.

That was something Al Jazeera accepted when it bought Current TV in January for an estimated $500 million. (Mr. Beck said
he tried to bid for the channel, but was rebuffed by Current’s co-founders, Al Gore and Joel Hyatt.) Al Jazeera currently streams its English-language news channel on the Internet free, in order to reach more viewers, but it will stop doing so when it officially takes over Current this spring.

“Having an online presence is critical to proving to distributors that a network’s content and brand are powerful and can draw an audience and subscriptions. But then they’re also saying, ‘Don’t put too much stuff online for free, because then the value prposition to the cable subscriber is less,’ ” Lynne Costantini, a former Time Warner Cable and Scripps Networks executive, told The Wall Street Journal in January.

Ms. Costantini has been a consultant for TheBlaze. Now she is joining the channel full time, as president of business development, to lead its effort to get on television.

The “Get TheBlaze” campaign will commence in phases and last for at least nine months. Mr. Beck wrote in his letter: “This journey for truth that we are on is much bigger than you and I; the future of liberty is hanging in the balance. All of us have a choice to make:
sit on the sideline, or get involved.” He described TheBlaze not just as a family-friendly news and entertainment channel, but a cog in nationwide political change.

“If we succeed then we change the media. If we change the media, we control the debate. If we control the debate, w! e change ! politics. And if we change politics, we change the country,” he wrote.

TheBlaze has more than 40 hours of programming a week, including simulcasts of Mr. Beck’s radio show, a nightly show of his just for the channel, a nightly panel conversation about the news, and a couple of documentaries and reality shows. In January Mr. Beck described ambitious plans for the channel, involving more news reporting (“We are currently looking for our own Woodwards and Bernsteins,” he said) and a libertarian bent. “I consider myself a libertarian,” Mr. Beck said.