The Health Network, which will relaunch this fall as WebMD Television, has reached affiliation agreements with Time Warner Cable and Adelphia Communications Corp., bringing its overall distribution commitments to 40 million, officials said last week.
Under the latest carriage deals, Time Warner will launch the network in 60 percent of its households, while Adelphia will give the service 3 million new subscribers. Those subscriber rollouts, which total nearly 11 million households, will be fulfilled by the end of 2003.
The Health Network, a 50-50 joint venture of Fox Cable Networks and Healtheon/WebMD, is competing neck-in-neck with Discovery Health Channel for distribution.
With last week's agreements, The Health Network has contractual commitments for more than 40 million subscribers by the end of 2004.
As a result, the programming service, currently at 17.5 million subscribers, will have distribution in almost all of the largest U.S. markets, including New York and nearly every Adelphia-served home in greater Los Angeles, including Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades and Santa Monica, Calif.
"I care about quantity and quality," Fox Cable Networks executive vice president of affiliate sales and distribution Lindsay Gardner said, regarding the Time Warner and Adelphia markets where The Health Network will be launched. "I care about where decision-makers are."
Time Warner actually debuted The Health Network on digital in New York earlier this year, according to officials at the programming service.
As for Adelphia, Gardner said, The Health Network will create a marketing campaign, anteing up $5 million to support the effort, to help the MSO promote its digital boxes and digital service.
He added that Adelphia will roll out The Health Network on analog in Southern California and mainly on digital in other regions, "subject to them hitting their benchmarks."
Time Warner currently carries The Health Network's rival, Discovery Health, on its digital platform, "AthenaTV," according to Bill Goodwyn, executive vice president of affiliate sales and marketing for Discovery Networks U.S. For example, like The Health Network, Time Warner offers Discovery Health on digital in New York.
Discovery Health is also part of the so-called three-pack on AT & T Broadband's digital platform, Headend in the Sky. And the network has carriage deals with Cox Communications Inc., DirecTV Inc. and EchoStar Communications Corp.
Late last year, Discovery permitted DirecTV to switch out now-defunct Discovery People and replace it with Discovery Health.
Currently, Discovery Health has 15 million subscribers, with commitments for close to 60 million within the next five years, according to Goodwyn. But Gardner continues to question how many firm rollout commitments Discovery Health actually has.
"All of our deals contain substantial subscriber commitments, 'analog-type' commitments," he said. "We've taken the beach. We've taken the cliffs. Now it's on to Paris."
Goodwyn, in turn, claimed that Fox is getting carriage for The Health Network by tying it to retransmission consent for Fox TV stations or to deals for the Fox regional sports networks.
Gardner said this was "flatly not the case with Time Warner." He added that The Health Network's carriage agreement with Adelphia "was part of a bigger deal that included retransmission consent."
Counting its two latest deals, The Health Network-which is reportedly paying launch fees ranging from $3 to $4.50 per subscriber-will have agreements with six of the top eight distributors, including the three largest: AT & T Broadband, for roughly 65 percent of its subscriber ; Time Warner; and DirecTV.
In a prepared statement, Time Warner senior vice president of programming Fred Dressler said, "The Health Network will bring our customers an increasingly important programming category-health-and enhance the value of Time Warner Cable's offerings."
The Health Network is also being rolled out by Charter Communications Inc., and it is essentially fully distributed by Cablevision Systems Corp.
The network will relaunch in the fall as WebMD TV, with a number of new original series and programs set to premiere then.
