I had the same idea years ago. These are my observations:
The only way your going to finance such a channel is through advertising. Advertisers will only pay big bucks for high ratings. Pay per View won’t work because there aren’t many people who will pay to watch the same program repeated twenty times in six months. So it’s got to be a free to air channel available on Sky and FreeView. That’s the only way you’re going to attract enough viewers to charge advertisers enough to make the channel viable.
For this service you’d have to pay millions in TX fees. An aviation channel that broadcasts 24/7 won’t work – too expensive. So you’re looking at broadcasting from 6pm to 2am. That’s eight hours per day or 6 hours and 40 minutes when you remove promo and advert slots. You’d therefore need around 2,400 of original programming PA. Or not. If you repeated the program twice a year, then you’d only need 1,200.
Commissioning programs is out – too expensive, so you’re going to need a good program buyer. I doubt very much if there was enough quality programs out there. Another idea was to broadcast either weekends or all day Sunday – anything to reduce the number of broadcasting hours and therefore programs needed.
Good luck. Now my idea was The Documentary Channel – it says exactly what it does on the tin. This would incorporate enough [quality] programs to make it viewable.
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