Stan Kroenke's duck call.

AuthorSchley, Stewart
PositionSPORTS biz

A DELICIOUS BIDDING WAR LAST MONTH pitted Denver's Kroenke Sport's Enterprises against a media industry rival for control of a TV channel devoted to ... ducks.

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Well, ducks and people who like to shoot them, that is. Along with: fishing, hunting, close encounters with elk, more fishing, the work lives of federal conservation officers, white tail deer and how best to kill, gut and eat them, and more fishing.

The TV network is Outdoor Channel, a once-sleepy cable channel that has risen to prominence thanks to a laser-like focus on its outdoor-enthusiast audience and the subjects that are meaningful to them. Based in Temecula, Calif., Outdoor Channel is one of only a banditti of well-established, broadly distribute television networks that is independently owned, with is to say, not controlled by one of the Big Five companies that pretty much own cable television in the U.S. (Most of what you watch on cable or satellite TV is brought to you by ... recite after me ... ABC-Disney, Discovery Communications, Fox, NBCUniversal or Viacom.)

Hunting for diamonds-in-the-rough like Outdoor Channel has become a sport unto itself. In another recent transaction, CBS Corp. bought up an obscure cable channel, the TV Guide Network, for the same reasons Kroenke Sports had its eye on outdoor (Channel. It's all about scarcity. Today it's almost impossible to successfully launch a new cable channel. The cable and satellite companies are already overfed on an expensive diet of programming that costs them (and you) dearly. Even the mighty ESPN (owned by ABC-Disney) has had trouble getting cable companies to pay for and offer a new regional sports channel, the Longhorn Network.

That makes independent networks like Outdoor Channel extremely attractive to buyers like Kroenke. Because it has contracts in place with almost all the big cable/satellite distributors. Outdoor Channel reaches a majority of the nation's TV homes. So regardless of what type of programs it televises or how high its Nielsen ratings are, the channel and others like it are extremely valuable purely because of their existing reach. It would take a huge investment and lots of perseverance to replicate what Outdoor Channel already has--a locked-down presence in the U.S. television market. Last year companies like Comcast and Dish Network collectively paid $21...

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