Allen Media Group-owned TheGrio.TV will launch on 11 Fox owned-and-operated station subchannels on Jan. 15 , ahead of Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend.
TheGrio.TV will feature African American-focused content including movies, sitcoms, dramas, concerts, talk shows, variety shows, game shows, news and lifestyle content, the company said in a release.
The 11 Fox owned-and-operated markets are New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, San Francisco, Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix, Minneapolis and Orlando. Allen Media said the 11 markets represent about 30% percent of general market households and 36.3% of African-American households.
Byron Allen's company bought TheGrio.com from NBCUniversal in 2016. In October, Allen's firm bought MGM's Light TV multicast network, which will be supplanted by TheGrio.TV. This past summer the website hit a peak of more than 10.5 million monthly active users, Allen Media said, also stating TheGrio.com is the largest employer of African-American journalists.
"The Grio – which means ‘storyteller’ in Africa – is the first platform to offer an online digital news destination, a free streaming app providing local news, weather, sports, traffic, and entertainment content geofenced to the user’s zip code, and an over-the-air broadcast television network,” Byron Allen said in a release. “With the Fox owned-and-operated stations coming on board as our launch group, TheGrio.TV over-the-air 24/7 broadcast television network is now positioned for long-term sustainable success.”
