KDOC-TV is the sole victor so far in Time Warner Cable Inc.’s ongoing fee dispute with other cable and satellite providers.
The Santa Ana-based station’s deal with Time Warner to air the Los Angeles Dodgers’ last six regular-season games against the San Francisco Giants and the Colorado Rockies proved fruitful on several fronts.
KDOC’s viewership skyrocketed to more than 370,000 households last week when the Dodgers clinched the National League West Division—“unprecedented exposure for the station,” said John Manzi, the independent station’s president and general manager.
“Our typical Monday is about 40,000 to 50,000,” Manzi said. “It’s a nice gesture from TWC to free up these games to be broadcast on a local broadcaster. They didn’t have to do it.”
Time Warner has its own cable operations but also provides content to other systems. The company paid $8.35 billion for a 25-year deal for the Dodgers broadcasts and immediately encountered resistance when it sought a $4 monthly per-subscriber fee from fellow cable operators.
The ensuing standoff has left the Dodgers fans who don’t have Time Warner Cable—the majority of the L.A. television market—unable to view games.
The decision to put the games on KDOC amounted to a goodwill gesture and took on added significance because the first three games were against the San Francisco Giants, the Dodgers’ archrival, with the division title on the line.
Local Owners
KDOC, which goes by the LA56 TV moniker, is owned by Bert Ellis of Ellis Communications Inc. and Henry Samueli, founder of Irvine-based chipmaker Broadcom Corp. and owner of the Anaheim Ducks professional hockey team.
The Ducks appear with some regularity on KDOC—the station is put to use any time the team gets bumped from Fox Sports West, which has rights to the Los Angeles Kings hockey club, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, and the NBA’s Clippers.
And the end-of-season run of Dodgers games wasn’t the first time the station has picked up spill-over programming from Time Warner.
“When they initially announced they were starting the Laker channel, they needed a partner to broadcast L.A. Galaxy and the L.A. Sparks, because they own the rights to the sporting events, but they didn’t have their channel up and running, and we were able to accommodate them,” Manzi said.
He declined to discuss specific terms of the Dodger deal—who got what in terms of advertising, for example—but said it was “a good business decision for us to partner with them on basically every level. The biggest benefit by far is the exposure that the station is getting.”
Broad Reach
KDOC occupies the first floor of the Orange County Register’s headquarters (see related story, page 1). It reaches the entire Los Angeles TV market, which stretches from the Pacific Ocean to the Mojave desert and from Santa Barbara to San Diego, taking in nearly 6 million households.
Dodger games will shift this week to cable systems that have deals with the MLB once the playoffs begin.
It remains to be seen how much last week’s run on KDOC will mean to the station’s efforts to emphasize its broad reach.
“We are trying to overcome the perception that KDOC is (an) Orange County station—that it reaches OC and not the rest of the L.A. TV area,” Manzi said. “We are a full-power, Los Angeles television market commercial station, and we cover it just like the other major English-language television stations. The audience level that we can reach was proven Monday night and is on par with the other stations.”
Change
Manzi took over the helm at KDOC five years ago when he set the course for change at the station.
“We are an entertainment station looking to secure entertainment options for the community,” said Manzi, who previously was general manager of Tribune Broadcasting’s KRCW-TV in Portland, Ore.
“If you followed the station five years ago, we had a lot of black-and-white, very, very old programming on the station, and today, the station is full of contemporary programming. When they brought me in, I started (to) develop relationships with major studios in town. As we’ve grown, more and more studios want to do business with us because we are a legitimate outlet for their programing.”
KABC Partnership
KDOC has partnered with KABC-TV and airs an original one-hour newscast at 8 p.m. produced at its Glendale studio. It also rebroadcasts KABC’s 11 p.m. newscast at midnight.
“We’ve been doing that since January, and it’s catching on,” he said. “The audience levels are slowly increasing. It just takes time for people to find the news product.”
