Interview Date: December 5, 2025
Interviewer: Stewart Schley
Series: Women In Cable Archive
Abstract
Cathy Rasenberger, President, Rasenberger Media LLC, and Co-Founder, Sports Studio Inc., traces a career built around “cracking the code” of cable distribution—starting in news, then learning the early pay-TV/cable ecosystem through marketing and trade publishing, before moving into programming-side roles at ESPN and TV Guide. She then joined Food Network when it was still a concept, helped execute carriage strategy with MSO backing and Tribune Company retransmission-consent leverage, and describes how the channel launched with limited programming while prioritizing distribution—along with the notable strategic error of launching with no license fee (the operator payment for carriage), despite having the leverage to charge one.
After Food Network’s growth and sale, she founded Rasenberger Media to help independent and niche programmers—often starting from a raw concept—raise money, define positioning, and win carriage in a historically decentralized operator environment. She explains the mechanics that “make or break” networks in distribution agreements (placement, license fees, termination/ad rights, and Most-Favored-Nation dynamics), and highlights episodes such as the difficult early U.S. push for Al Jazeera that ultimately achieved scale by acquiring Current (bringing existing carriage along with it). Rasenberger closes by mapping industry transition: cord-cutting and high cable costs catalyzed FAST’s rise. She launched 20+ FAST channels and argues the bundle will reassert itself via operator-streaming partnerships, and she describes buying SportsTribal to build a major free-sports aggregator while advising today’s programmers to pursue FAST, YouTube, and social ubiquity to meet evolving viewing habits.
Interview Transcript
STEWART SCHLEY: Lovely to have you here and thanks for pressing play on this episode of the Hauser Oral History Series presented by Syndeo Institute at The Cable Center. I’m with my guest in Stamford, Connecticut, on a brisk day in December 2025, and I’m here to tell you — and I can vouch for this, and I will die on this hill – nobody, and I mean nobody, has launched more cable television channels on this planet than the person sitting to my left, Cathy Rasenberger, president of Rasenberger Media and a longtime executive in the cable and allied video fields. Lovely to have you, Cathy.
CATHY RASENBERGER: Thank you, so nice to be here.
SCHLEY: I’ve been so excited to talk to you because there’s so much to talk about. And when I say you’ve launched more cable channels than anyone, what I think I mean is that you found avenues of distribution for so many channels that probably would never have made it to the screen, or might not have made it to the screen.
RASENBERGER: I hope, I’d like to believe that is one of my gifts to the industry. When I started my business 28 years ago after leaving Food Network, which I’d been the head of distribution and marketing for — I started the business to advise the cable industry, but specifically to help stand-alone, startup cable networks with no leverage get launched. And I’ve brought more niche content to diverse audience segments in cable than anybody.
SCHLEY: Just to start out, throw out a name or two, what networks have you helped birth?
RASENBERGER: Oh, folks, from the early days, I was just talking about this with you earlier, two networks out of Canada called Newsworld and Trio were two of my first. I worked with TV One for two years while we looked for a partner or this Radio One, looking for a partner, which then became Comcast. RFD, Outside Television, Al Jazeera Network, AccuWeather. Newsmax was the most recent major, successful network, but I’ve advised almost every major media company that’s been looking to get into the cable network space.
SCHLEY: They call Cathy.
RASENBERGER: Yes.
SCHLEY: They call Cathy, and for those who aren’t in the know, when I say distribution, what does that mean?
RASENBERGER: Well, so distribution — so to launch a cable network is a lot of things. It’s to develop the strategy. It’s, in many cases, to help raise the money. It’s very expensive to launch a cable television network. Some cases, it’s up to 100 million dollars before you break even. So I would work with the founder, in many cases, to go out and raise the money. And then I would get distribution on the cable platforms and on the DBS platforms for that network. Not an easy feat for an independent cable network part that wasn’t part of a big programming group.
SCHLEY: Cathy, the reason I ask, and thank you for the definitional help, is that today, we’re in this land of a sea of infinite content. I can distribute a television channel today if I want to. I can use a platform like YouTube, or Vivo, or whatever it is. Back in the day, really the only way to get a television channel on a screen in someone’s living room, you had to own an over-the-air TV station, or you had to launch a cable network.
RASENBERGER: Exactly.
SCHLEY: And that’s why it was hard.
RASENBERGER: Yeah, very hard. In the early days when I started my career, there were very few cable networks in the early ’80s.
SCHLEY: Go figure.
RASENBERGER: There was ESPN, there was HBO, there was USA Network, there was a handful, and then the gold rush began, and everybody started trying to launch cable television networks. And just over the years, it has become just more and more difficult to do that. But I was there in the early days of ESPN when people didn’t really watch too much ESPN. (laughter)
SCHLEY: Said very charitably and tenderly, yeah.
RASENBERGER: Yeah.
SCHLEY: How did this all or how did this start? How did you get into this business at large?
RASENBERGER: Well, so I started my career, believe it or not, in news. I had wanted to be in news all through college. I went to work for ABC News in London, disillusioned by the news business, it wasn’t what I believed it was. It was ratings driven like everything else on television. So I moved back to the United States, and I was introduced to someone named Ed Bleier who ran Warner Bros. Television, and they sold movies. They were the second largest revenue generator next to Atari, if you remember Atari, at Warner Bros. And we sold movies to pay television and to HBO.
SCHLEY: The likes of HBO.
RASENBERGER: HBO, and I went to work for Ed Bleier doing promotion and marketing. And at that time, as I think I mentioned to you, we didn’t have a lot of clients in the cable television business. We had HBO and Showtime maybe.
SCHLEY: It’s scarce, like a duopoly sort of, yeah.
RASENBERGER: Yeah, but I learned an enormous amount about from Ed Bleier about marketing movies to cable. And I think — well, one of my best stories was, I remember, Ed Bleier asked me, at one point, to put some loglines into newspapers. Loglines were a bit of text about the movie. That was a form of advertisement, but invisible to the reader that it was — well, that it was actually marketing. And, at one point, I said to Ed, “Why are we buying a paper in Westchester?” And he said, “Well, why? Because that’s where Michael Fuchs, the head of HBO lives.” So I had I —
SCHLEY: This is targeted advertising.
RASENBERGER: Yeah, it’s very targeted advertising.
SCHLEY: One person.
RASENBERGER: The definition of targeted advertising. But that’s where I really got into the cable industry. It was the birth of the cable industry in the early 80s, 1982. And from there, I was hired by Cablevision Magazine to run the sales of their multiple publications, and I was the publisher.
SCHLEY: It was a trade magazine for the industry.
RASENBERGER: It was a trade magazine, the leading trade magazine, at a time when there was so much advertising money coming into the cable industry, that we — at one point, the Western Show Edition, had 500 pages and were among the top 10 consumer and trade magazines in terms of advertising in the country. So it was an indication of the amount of money going into the cable industry, marketing and launching new cable television networks.
SCHLEY: Your two stories, Cathy, are related, the targeting of the president of HBO and the advertising bounty in the trade publication arena. Because it testifies to how these companies, a lot of programmers needed to court the cable industry for the very reason you just described.
RASENBERGER: Yes, and the best way to do it was through the only major cable trade magazine, and so everyone had to be there. So most of the major programmers had not just a 52-time-a-year campaign, they had 104 time, they took spreads out. So it was a concentrated, small industry, and everyone was marketing to the same small group of cable operators.
SCHLEY: This is how you — well, the Ed Bleier gig and Cablevision Magazine, this is how you learned the cable industry, right?
RASENBERGER: Oh, and how I met the cable industry.
SCHLEY: Met the cable industry.
RASENBERGER: I mean, I was, as publisher of Cablevision Magazine, really on a tremendous perch —
SCHLEY: Access.
RASENBERGER: Access to everybody. And it was a small industry. I often say that people’s careers — because the industry was growing so quickly at that time, many people just rode the wave of growth and succeeded in spite of their lack of talent or — I mean a lot of major careers rode that wave. It was tremendously exciting time to be in cable.
SCHLEY: I’ve had that thought. And then you pivoted, or you segued, or you moved into the actual programming arena, correct?
RASENBERGER: So I worked at ESPN, I moved from Cablevision, was hired by ESPN first in ad sales. So I started in ad sales when no media buyer would buy ESPN.
SCHLEY: What was on ESPN at that time?
RASENBERGER: Australian rules football and not particularly exciting content, truck and tractor pull. And I remember going to media buyers trying to convince them to buy advertising in cable. Media buyers are the most junior people at an agency, not inclined to take a risk. And they were perfectly happy advertising on broadcast television. So I learned early on that you had to go straight to the top if you wanted to make change, and so I went to the chief marketing officers at companies —
SCHLEY: Of the client company —
RASENBERGER: Of the client company —
SCHLEY: — not the agency.
RASENBERGER: So like Roger Morrison at Kodak, and convinced him that if he took one Super Bowl spot off broadcast television, he could buy an annual buy on ESPN. So many of the big chief marketing officers started buying cable, understood the value and the opportunity of buying cable. And then as ESPN brought in better live sports, the floodgates opened and advertising —
SCHLEY: Ultimately, in the late ’80s, the NFL came to ESPN.
RASENBERGER: And the NFL came to ESPN.
SCHLEY: How did you get people to return your calls?
RASENBERGER: I’m persuasive and persistent, so that’s how I did it, and I had a great story. I was part of the new business —
SCHLEY: Right, wave —
RASENBERGER: — cable, and I had an opportunity to share with them. And so I went from advertising to another great, beginning startup. The president of ESPN asked me to start something new, a new division of ESPN, their international division.
SCHLEY: Ah.
RASENBERGER: They knew that there was money to be made internationally; they just didn’t know how. So our lawyer, Andy Brilliant, then the lawyer of ESPN, and I, basically had a whiteboard, and we went and generated business internationally. That is now, I would bet, a billion-dollar part of ESPN, the international business. But it was just the two of us looking for whatever, joint ventures, syndication partnerships.
SCHLEY: Right, again, you’re looking for distribution —
RASENBERGER: Looking for distribution in other markets, but distribution of content, not necessarily the network. So we’d syndicate content —
SCHLEY: Oh, I see.
RASENBERGER: — we’d joint venture with a partner in the field, and that was an exciting time to grow ESPN.
SCHLEY: I want to really get to your next stage. You did work for TV Guide though in between.
RASENBERGER: I did, another startup. So Murdoch had just purchased TV Guide from Annenberg, and he believed in this new business, cable. And so he wanted to create system-specific guides, because the guides have become so dense with so much content.
SCHLEY: Too much, yeah.
RASENBERGER: So I came in to create their cable division, and that meant separating an edition out of the regional guide and creating one just for Time Warner in Manhattan perhaps or —
SCHLEY: Right, again, indicative of, we’re starting to get a lot of programming flowing through these cable systems.
RASENBERGER: An untenable amount of programming to be in one TV Guide. So we created different, and each system had a different lineup, so we had to create a system-specific guide. And I do remember a wonderful story. I had just started at TV Guide and had not met Murdoch. And I called in one morning and said to my boss, Joe Cece, who was the publisher at that time, and I said, “Joe, I — I’ve thrown my back out, I was sailing, I’ve thrown my back out, I’m going to miss work today.” He said, “That’s unfortunate because Murdoch’s coming in —”
SCHLEY: Oh, my Lord.
RASENBERGER: “— to hear your pitch for the five million dollars you need to develop the system-specific guide.” So I pulled myself together, I got in, I made my pitch, I got my five million dollars. And then all the heads of Murdoch’s organization started chatting, and my back started going out again. And I remember slowly trying to sit down on an antique credenza that was behind me. And a guy named Marty Singerman, who worked for Murdoch, went behind Murdoch and started waving violently saying, “Do not sit on Murdoch’s —”
SCHLEY: Oh, my golly —
RASENBERGER: But anyway, so I made it out of that meeting, my back went out.
SCHLEY: Got your budget though.
RASENBERGER: I got my budget, the other people at — I literally was taken out of the lobby like a piece of pizza into my taxi, sent home, and for a week, I recovered —
SCHLEY: Way to take one for the team.
RASENBERGER: — but I got my money.
SCHLEY: I think it was a pivotal moment though when you went to work for a startup that was called Food Network?
RASENBERGER: Yes.
SCHLEY: Is that true?
RASENBERGER: So I started —
SCHLEY: Do tell, do tell.
RASENBERGER: I was hired at Food Network when it was just a concept, and we worked out of Reese Schonfeld’s — it must have been his bachelor apartment because we didn’t have an office then.
SCHLEY: Reese had been an executive of CNN, correct or —?
RASENBERGER: He was head of — he’s helped start CNN, and he was the president of the Food Network. And interesting, we thought the viewers would be like the old ladies who watched Julia Child. We really did not know who our viewers were until we finally got ratings and realized, oh my God, they were half men, half women. But the interesting thing about Food Network, so I — we came in to handle distribution. I was not the head of distribution at that time, but I ran national accounts, did all their cable deals for them, and then was promoted to head of distribution. But we went out with — it was a wonderful time to be at Food Network. It was the product of several multi-system operators and Tribune Broadcasting. So joined together to launch Food Network, Colony Communications, which is part of Providence Journal, Continental Cablevision, and Tribune was a retransmission consent partner.
SCHLEY: Okay, let me unpack something. Why was it important for those cable operating companies to invest in a programming network?
RASENBERGER: They contributed a commitment to launch the network —
SCHLEY: There’s that word again.
RASENBERGER: — on their systems, giving us a launch commitment that was pretty sizable on the first day. So we launched in the — we had to launch by a deadline to get — I don’t remember what that deadline was, but we launched with two hours of content, repeated it 12 times a day. And we launched with retransmission consent from Tribune, but no license fee, which turned out to be one of the biggest mistakes we made, but we launched. We built it up to probably 30 million subs in five years and then sold to Scripps.
SCHLEY: And this is fundamental, Cathy. The cable programming business was supported monetarily in two ways, not just one. A lot of the national, over-the-air TV networks lived on a stream of advertising revenue. What’s a license fee?
RASENBERGER: So such a good question. A license fee is what the cable operators paid for the license to carry your network.
SCHLEY: For the right —
RASENBERGER: — the right to carry. And all cable networks, until that time, had two serious revenue streams, license fees and ad revenue. And we were the first cable network to launch with no license fee. It turned out to be a terrible mistake in the long run.
SCHLEY: You could’ve launched with a fee.
RASENBERGER: We could have launched with a fee because we had the leverage of retransmission consent. Tribune pushed us out and required cable operators to carry us, and so we actually had the leverage to demand a price — a pretty sizable fee at the time, but we did not.
SCHLEY: Okay, well, live and learn. Retransmission consent, we could do an entire interview about that, but it’s — we call it retrans in the business. But it basically allowed an over-the-air TV station to demand certain terms by which their signal could be carried by a cable company.
RASENBERGER: Exactly.
SCHLEY: Clever companies like yours said, our quid pro quo will be put our new network on Channel 35 or —
RASENBERGER: Exactly.
SCHLEY: — whatever it might be. P.S., did programmers used to care about what channel position a channel would be on?
RASENBERGER: Totally.
SCHLEY: Why?
RASENBERGER: Well, because — and it still is true with EPGs — viewership on the bottom 10 channels was dramatically better.
SCHLEY: Literally channels 1 through —
RASENBERGER: Ten.
SCHLEY: — 2 through 11 or —?
RASENBERGER: Dramatically better. Programmers pay a fee to operators to get channel placement in the top 50. So it was — and we had a channel position in the top 20, I think, with almost every operator, so we had very good positioning for the network, but no license fee.
SCHLEY: It’s funny, Cathy, because today if you had an inspiration to launch something food related, you’d do it on the internet. You’d do it as a website or a whatever. But this was a niche idea that had some appeal as a television channel in the day.
RASENBERGER: And it wasn’t really so niche, think about it. “Everybody Eats” was our tagline.
SCHLEY: I remember the tagline.
RASENBERGER: “Everybody Eats,” it’s not niche content, and it wasn’t — it was more of a lifestyle. It was the first of the lifestyle networks, Home & Garden, Food Network. More and more people were looking to their kitchens and cooking as a form of entertainment.
SCHLEY: Sure.
RASENBERGER: And so our assumptions that we were going to be teaching people how to cook, old ladies who used to watch Julia Child on PBS, that wasn’t at all true. It was baby boomers, half men, half women. Every show had its own particular flavor to it.
SCHLEY: Sure.
RASENBERGER: Mario Batali had a particularly male audience. So when we could finally get ratings and study them, we saw a huge amount of viewership building up over the day getting to Mario Batali’s show, which was extremely well viewed, and then dropping off. And it’s because women had dropped off before Mario Batali’s show and then didn’t come back on again. So we didn’t really know who our viewer was for the longest time, and we’re therefore marketing to the wrong people.
SCHLEY: How was the food at the Food Network?
RASENBERGER: Well, the food, we did have — we were in an office originally that had studios on one side and had the offices on another. And we would bring in someone like Emeril Lagasse, and we’d do an entire season in one week. So we do six episodes on Monday, six episodes on Tuesday. The interesting thing about Emeril is incredibly wooden in the beginning.
SCHLEY: Really?
RASENBERGER: He was really not very good. The board came in one day, and so we just put up some folding chairs in front of his set, and he became electrified. And that’s where the boom, you know, his signature boom, came from.
STEWART SCHLEY: He needed an audience?
RASENBERGER: He needed an audience —
SCHLEY: Oh my gosh.
RASENBERGER: — and he became entirely different. So we did a lot of those. We would bring in — we’d change the sets to a — it was very inexpensive to produce this programming. And we operated for, gosh, the first two or three years without any marketing at all. Robin Leach was a talent in our on our network, and he was given equity to help us reach 30 million subscribers, and at that point, he would get a big kicker.
SCHLEY: Interesting.
RASENBERGER: And he would go out and sign cookbooks in grocery stores in Rochester or whatever. But it was a really fun, fun time.
SCHLEY: Although, I think you mentioned, nobody really cooked at the Food —
RASENBERGER: No, nobody cooked. Of senior management, the only person who cooked was a woman we’d hired from a food magazine to help us with programming. Reese and his wife, who was head of operations, didn’t cook. I certainly didn’t cook, I — (laughter)
SCHLEY: A lot of takeout orders going on.
RASENBERGER: Yeah, oh, my God, nobody cooked, so it was fascinating it was as successful as it was.
SCHLEY: Please tell me what you learned about the business from that experience that maybe you didn’t know going know going in to the Food Network.
RASENBERGER: Well, first, I learned that you could be extremely successful with spending very little money. The Food Network in the early days is very low cost, we didn’t spend money on programming, our goal was to get distribution first —
SCHLEY: You want it — right.
RASENBERGER: — and better programming would follow. And that, frankly, has been my mantra for my entire career.
SCHLEY: For sure.
RASENBERGER: Distribution first and then spend money on programming.
SCHLEY: And you guys got to, did you say, 30 million households?
RASENBERGER: Probably 35 million when Scripps bought it, and that was the time when there were hundreds of cable operators, MSOs, multisystem operators.
SCHLEY: Sure.
RASENBERGER: And we did charter deals with all of them. And it grew very rapidly beyond 35 million, but we were in Canada, we were — So it was the first major lifestyle network to get broad distribution.
SCHLEY: What was, Cathy, or what is a distribution agreement with a carrier, whether it’s satellite TV or a cable company? These are probably pretty complex instruments, right?
RASENBERGER: They are long, very complex, and very fraught negotiations in many cases. But there are really only a few things that matter in each cable agreement. Placement, where you’re being distributed in a cable operator, the license fee, termination rights, ad rights. And, what’s only known within the cable industry well, a clause called the Most Favored Nations clause —
SCHLEY: Uh-oh.
RASENBERGER: — which means that if you give a better deal to one operator, every other operator gets it as well. So it is the license agreements that make or break channels, frankly.
SCHLEY: How is the subject of content treated in a license agreement? It’s spelling out what’s this network all about, right?
RASENBERGER: Well, the cable operator wants to be it as specific as possible, very, very detailed tied just to that network. But in my — after I’ve started my business, I made sure that all of those clause of those descriptions were as broad as possible. Because the exit for many cable networks is to sell your distribution to another cable service that wants to launch a new network, but it may not be a food network. They may be a crafts network, or they may be a home design network or something, you need it to be as general and broad. I would aim for lifestyle network.
SCHLEY: Okay, literally, those words would be in the agreement.
RASENBERGER: Well, yes, it would be in the agreement. So many years later when I launched Al Jazeera, we ended up buying a network called Current, and we were able to do it because we had a very similar… Al — it’s a longer story. I had negotiated the original deals for Newsworld that were then sold to Barry Diller, which were then sold to —
SCHLEY: This is the lineage of this network.
RASENBERGER: — yeah, but never reopened because they were very strong deals, and were sold to Current, and then Al Jazeera bought them from Current with the same agreements intact. But they were able to buy it because they were one of the few in the industry who had a similar content.
SCHLEY: I get it, yeah.
RASENBERGER: So that it made sense for them.
SCHLEY: And we have seen in the early days different networks mutate into different — You remember Arts & Entertainment Network, a very highbrow, cultural, theatrical orientation, ultimately became something very different.
RASENBERGER: Yes, there have been a lot of court cases around things like that, yeah.
SCHLEY: So what inspired you to realize you could build a business out of this knowledge base and these relationships that you have?
RASENBERGER: So interesting, I often say that I act— so I had launched Food Network, Scripps bought it. They had a me at Home & Garden, and so I left, very nice severance package. And I remember coming home one day and saying to my husband, “I think there’s an opportunity for me to create my own business.” Digital cable had just blossomed. There was a huge amount of bandwidth available now for other niche networks to launch a cable network, other niche content companies to launch a cable network, but needed my expertise to figure out how to develop the strategy, negotiate the agreements. And so my husband and I flip-flopped roles. He stayed home with our three-month-old baby, and I went out onto the road and created this company, and there was just an abundance of capacity. There was a huge amount of opportunity for new cable launches, and I provided a much needed skill for content companies that needed to break into the cable industry and didn’t know how to do it.
SCHLEY: Because you alluded to this, I think it’s a key point, the onset of digital video technology flipped the scheme. It used to be we had 35, 54 channels, and that’s it, and now, we had a room for a lot more stuff, and you had this renaissance of cable programming.
RASENBERGER: Huge abundance of a lot of really smart ideas, a lot of great networks launched, a lot of really crazy ideas. But I remember the worst was a network —
SCHLEY: Oh no.
RASENBERGER: — a company — Hooters, do you remember Hooters?
SCHLEY: Like the restaurant? Oh my —
RASENBERGER: Hooters, the restaurant. Hooters was one of the networks that called me and said —
SCHLEY: A Hooters network.
RASENBERGER: — they wanted to launch, and I was confused about what the programming would be. But one year, I had probably 80 companies come to me —
SCHLEY: In a year?
RASENBERGER: — to ask me to represent them, in a year. So there’s a huge — I touched, I saw the opportunity, I seized the opportunity. And I built a very successful business around it because — and I don’t know if you could have done it in a different segment of the industry — there was such an abundance of companies trying to crack into the cable industry at the time, but needed my insider intelligence and negotiating capacity.
SCHLEY: Absolutely, I think that’s the key. And in that year when you had 80 inquiries, you selected a handful, I presume, to represent?
RASENBERGER: I never took more than eight at any one time, and that turned out to be too much, but I represented five, so… But we would choose them very, very carefully. I had to believe that they matched the criteria that the cable operators were looking for. That they had enough money to go the distance to get a network launched. They had the right management in charge to actually execute on a good strategy, and they were filling a niche, a meaningful niche that was unserved in the cable industry at the time. So I was very, very choosy. Because also my success in getting that network launched was my calling card for new business.
SCHLEY: Cathy, when you did come to terms with a new client, what do you then do? It’s Tuesday, and now, you’ve got a new client, what do you —?
RASENBERGER: Well, in many cases, companies would come to me with an idea only, just the concept for a network, and I would then basically flesh out that concept. If I felt it served an underserved niche on the cable system lineups, I’d flesh it out, I’d develop a strategy, and I’d then go out and test it with the private equity market and see if there was interest in funding such a network. The private equity money would only come in after you secured distribution, however, so it was a tandem, a concurrent job.
SCHLEY: But you were involved in some gestation at the very early —
RASENBERGER: Very, very beginning —
SCHLEY: — opportunity for these networks.
RASENBERGER: In almost every case, I was involved from the — it was, in many cases, just me, the CEO, and maybe a programming person building the concept. And then I would take it through the distribution process. Once we got enough distribution within the industry, I’d then bring in someone to run distribution. So I would often run distribution, marketing, advertising, in some cases, many areas. And then we’d bring in the executives to take that over, and I’d phase out. So I always say I birthed the baby, I diapered the baby, and then I turned him over for adoption.
SCHLEY: Well, there was this organization within a lot of cable networks that was affiliate relations, and you were effectively doing that kind of work.
RASENBERGER: I was the outsourced affiliate relations department for my — all of my clients. So I acted as their EVP, and in some cases, their COO until they could hire one, and I brought in a team. So I would hire a field sales team because, at that time, the cable industry was very decentralized.
SCHLEY: Exactly.
RASENBERGER: So you actually had to go out and sell in at the regional level and, sometimes, the system level if the system was big enough. So you needed a team out there marketing the channel to every regional cable system at every major MSO.
SCHLEY: That’s interesting, you talk about the decentralization. How did programming carriage decisions get made? I always assume there’s some czar at the cable operating level who says yes or no.
RASENBERGER: Very decentralized for a long period of time. You had to actually convince regions that a particular network made sense to launch. And then you try to create consensus within that, other regional divisions of all of that particular MSO, and drive a programming decision to the top.
SCHLEY: To the top.
RASENBERGER: So that’s how it started originally. As it became harder and harder to launch cable networks, and that was probably the last one I launched was Newsmax 10 years ago, it became a much more centralized decision from the top-down. And oftentimes, you had to actually use other points of leverage. Huge letter-writing campaigns, lobbyists in markets to actually drive demand for the network.
SCHLEY: Letter-writing campaigns?
RASENBERGER: Yeah.
SCHLEY: Example, please?
RASENBERGER: I’ll think about which one it was, which network I did this or maybe it’s Al Jazeera where I actually conducted letter-writing campaigns, boxed them up, and then took them in to the —
SCHLEY: These are letters written by people who wanted to have that channel on their television set?
RASENBERGER: Yes, exactly.
SCHLEY: Oh my — did it work, was it helpful?
RASENBERGER: Yeah, yes, it did.
SCHLEY: One of the — you’re selling yourself short a little bit because one of the key attributes was you could get your phone calls returned. You had knowledge, relationships, reputation.
RASENBERGER: I have always said integrity and your reputation are the most important assets you have. And I developed relationships early on, primarily at The Food Network, and I was able to maintain those relationships. So it became almost a partnership between me and many of the operators. They knew that once I had taken a client on, I’d put them through my criteria shield and that I was only taking on the networks that would get broad distribution across the other MSOs.
SCHLEY: You’re not wasting anybody’s time.
RASENBERGER: Yeah, no, exactly.
SCHLEY: You’re not wasting anybody’s time.
RASENBERGER: And I also had a perspective that individual operators didn’t have. Comcast only sees what’s going on in Comcast. So I knew if I could get ubiquitous distribution for a network across Comcast, and Time Warner, and Continental Cablevision and … So I became a resource and a partner with a lot of the cable operators.
SCHLEY: One of your clients — it’s a misunderstood story, but can you take us through the Al Jazeera relationship and how you helped to birth that network?
RASENBERGER: So that — when that network launched, 2005, I was asked to actually get them launched here in the US. Fantastic news network, in-depth journalism, but there was a high level of, let’s say, misperception about who Al Jazeera was. Most Americans thought it was Al-Qaeda.
SCHLEY: Right, right, yeah.
RASENBERGER: And so it got — it actually got some distribution on the East and the West Coast and in Detroit and other markets, but it was never going to get ubiquitous distribution. At that time in the United States, 2005, the number of people with passports was something like 13 percent of the American population, extraordinarily low, so we were not an outward-looking country. We were very parochial in our choice of news sources, and Al Jazeera was just way too foreign, whether you thought it was Al-Qaeda or not. And so that was probably the most difficult launch I’ve ever done. But it became very successful because, as I mentioned a little earlier, I then suggested to them that they look at Current to purchase. I was familiar with the deal since I’d done them for Newsworld.
SCHLEY: Your name’s on the agreement.
RASENBERGER: Exactly, and so they ended up — I can’t remember the year, but they ended up buying Current for $500 million with 50 million subscribers. So it absolutely overnight put Al Jazeera on the map in the US with ubiquitous distribution.
SCHLEY: So my poor mathematical brain says that was 10 dollars per household.
RASENBERGER: That’s exactly right, 10 dollars per subscriber.
SCHLEY: We call them subscribers, but I think it’s important for people to understand, they didn’t necessarily subscribe to any particular channel, they simply had it available in their home, so vernacular —
RASENBERGER: Exactly —
SCHLEY: — semantics.
RASENBERGER: — no, but that’s a big — that’s very important.
SCHLEY: What now, what has changed?
RASENBERGER: Oh my God, so much has changed. What has changed in the cable industry would you say?
SCHLEY: If I had a really cool idea for a channel that resonated with you, what would you tell me?
RASENBERGER: Oh, I would tell you that — 10 years ago I told people this — “No chance in hell.” There is no — New cable networks are not getting launched, and that started way before I launched Newsmax. Newsmax filled an important niche that cable operators realized pretty widely they needed to fill, an alternative, right-leaning network. Because —
SCHLEY: Because they didn’t want to depend on just one.
RASENBERGER: — they didn’t want Fox to dominate the right alone, for two reasons. You needed to have a balanced offering of news networks. Most news networks do lean left, Fox was the only one on the right. Also selfishly, they needed leverage against Fox.
SCHLEY: You can pit one against the other.
RASENBERGER: Yes, exactly. You can’t have one of anything and have leverage as a cable operator, so there’s always room for a second low cost network in the same— But anyway, Newsmax was my last major launch because the doors were shutting on cable launches. The margins were shrinking for these packages, the operator could not increase their license fees to subscribers and stay competitive with DBS or with the new virtual MVPDs entering the market. So there just — it became a zero-sum game. They would only launch a network if another network was coming off the dial. So I did get — for instance, I got AccuWeather launched because it was the low-cost alternative to The Weather Channel.
SCHLEY: Sure, right, I get it.
RASENBERGER: So many operators dropped The Weather Channel to launch AccuWeather. But it became a zero-sum game in cable.
SCHLEY: It’s just that there’s — what a lesson that things always mutate and change. There was a time and when you launched Food Network, when there was a clamor for a new channel to put on my cable pipe and —
RASENBERGER: And when I worked at ESPN, I mean, a huge birthing of the cable industry at that time with cable networks being launched every other month. It was the gold rush in cable in the ’80s, and then again, when digital cable emerged —
SCHLEY: Right, we had a second —
RASENBERGER: — there was a second gold rush, or at least a second opportunity, wave of opportunity, but that’s over.
SCHLEY: And is it trite to say the internet took away all the economic momentum for cable to be the medium of choice for a launch?
RASENBERGER: Well, I think several things happened. Cable license fees got too high, and cable fees to subscribers became too high. It’s one of the reasons the free ad-supported streaming business grew so quickly, exploded here in the US, is that consumers were tired of paying so much for cable. They started cutting the cord. We, unlike every other country in the world, did not have a free-to-air alternative. And then COVID happened, so it accelerated, it fueled the growth of free ad-supported streaming because smart TV manufacturers started flooding the market with more TVs. We bought a TV for every room, in our bathrooms, in our back porch, and all anyone did was watch TV. So overnight, a new alternative industry emerged that could support the birth of 2,000 new free ad-supported streaming networks, which is the number that exists today. And that’s because it grew overnight. But there was such frustration, there was such anger among consumers about the cost of cable.
SCHLEY: And an embrace of an alternative means.
RASENBERGER: And there was an alternative, so they ceased —
SCHLEY: But Rasenberger Media could have said, okay, game over, we’re going to go do something else or do nothing else. But you have also pivoted with this changing environment, how so?
RASENBERGER: Well, 10 years ago, I began to see the impact of cord cutting on my cable clients. So I urged all of them to launch a free ad-supported streaming network as well, as a complement to their cable service, to really offset the loss of cable revenues, and got into that industry at the birth of it. I actually worked with a fellow named Sean Doherty at Wurl to go out and proselytize the opportunity. If you stitch together VOD content on streaming and created a linear feed, how you could exponentially increase viewership and ad revenue. And I understood the opportunity early on. I started launching a lot of these FAST networks, free ad-supported streaming networks. You could launch them within six months pretty ubiquitously, you could break even within a year, and it was easy. And as cable got harder and harder to launch, I pivoted my business into the free ad-supported streaming business. Not exclusively, I continued to represent cable networks, but I saw the writing on the wall, that the opportunity for growth had ended in cable but there was still a sizable market in FAST that my clients could take advantage of.
SCHLEY: We — truly, this is a fancy word, this disintermediated television, right? The gatekeepers who used to control, whether you were one of those 35 channels or not, were bypassed, if you will.
RASENBERGER: Yes, well, that’s going to change, and I do believe it’s all going to circle back to the cable operators, the bundle.
SCHLEY: That’s interesting. See, I think that’s fascinating.
RASENBERGER: And here we are at Charter, and I think Charter, more than any other operator, set the stage. They saw what was happening when they were approaching their renegotiation with Disney and they didn’t see the margins, and they didn’t see a real future continuing on the same path that they were on. And they thought we can start deemphasizing cable video or we can reinvent the model. And now, they are at no additional charge to their basic subscribers.
SCHLEY: They’re video-based.
RASENBERGER: Their cable video subscribers. They’re offering the Disney app, the Hulu app, and the — I can’t remember which other one it is, maybe the ESPN app, but 125 dollars’ worth of value for no cost, and everybody wins then. Everybody wins when you bundle the content together, and partner, and collaborate. So Charter started that. Kudos to [Chris] Winfrey and to Tom Montemagno. They said, “The future has — we’ve got to define our own future. We’ve got to pivot from the ways we’ve been working in the past.”
SCHLEY: And if you could point to one transaction as emblematic of what is going to come, that would be it, right? I mean, that is representative —
RASENBERGER: That is absolutely an indication of the change that’s coming in the industry. And I do believe that the cable and broadband operators combined, have the opportunity to be, continue to be the one-stop shop or —
SCHLEY: The bundler of choice.
RASENBERGER: The bundler of choice. And everybody wants one bundle. People are tired now of, first of all, not remembering what streaming services they’re paying for —
SCHLEY: All the time.
RASENBERGER: — and not being able to discover what they’re paying, the apps they’re paying for. If you’re a Yankees fan in New York, you need five different apps to get the games, and so people are tired. They want to go back to a one-stop shop, and they want — there was a recent study, something like 65 percent said that discovery was the number one problem in television today. But that they would — 85 percent said that they would take ESPN Unlimited for 30 dollars because they would get the majority of what they needed in one place.
SCHLEY: You hear it all the time, anecdotally, from friends, family about this discovery issue. Cathy, what has your involvement in the FAST category today been?
RASENBERGER: Well, so about a year ago, so I was actually under Rasenberger Media launching a ton of FAST networks, launched about 20 plus. But I realized that the one most underrepresented category in the space was sports, which seems counterintuitive because sports has always been the driver of advertising revenue and viewership.
SCHLEY: True.
RASENBERGER: And until very recently, it was represented the smallest category in the FAST space. The opportunity to purchase a company called SportsTribal, the leading free sports streaming platform in Europe, was presented to me, and it had 60 sports FAST channels on it. And I jumped at it because I knew that the future in streaming and in FAST would be in sports.
SCHLEY: So you bought it.
RASENBERGER: I bought it, yes, I bought it with two partners, and we pivoted it to the US where it could grow significantly. In Europe and the rest of the world, FAST has not taken off at the same pace that it has in the US because they have a free-to-air alternative. It’s just growing in a very different way. But we bought the company, we pivoted it to the US, we added another 65 sports channels on it. We added thousands of hours of sports-related VOD. It’s available in 75 countries, and we are now the largest aggregator of free sports streaming content in the world actually. And I guessed right because, now, the emphasis in streaming is all on live sports. And live sports is actually the magnet that’s pulling more money from big brands and advertisers into this space.
SCHLEY: And you talked about democratizing the access to live sports.
RASENBERGER: Yes, so in addition to carrying the FAST networks for some of the professional leagues, we’re carrying a lot of networks, like pickleball or like, padel, or NASCAR that did not have – well, NASCAR had pretty wide accessibility on cable television, but sports that never had accessibility to really passionate sports fans on television before.
SCHLEY: Where were you going to find it?
RASENBERGER: Couldn’t find it. I often use the analogy that Free Live Sports, my platform, it’s a lot like a big sports bar in Times Square with a hundred screens. And you might go in as a passionate cricket fan to find cricket —
SCHLEY: Great analogy.
RASENBERGER: — because you can’t find it anywhere else. And you go in, and you get your fix of cricket, and then you look around the sports bar and you go, “Oh, my God, I didn’t realize they had Formula 1 or they had PFL fighting.” And most sports fans don’t just love one sport; they love a lot of sports.
SCHLEY: Fair.
RASENBERGER: So you stay within the sports bar. And so we’re creating basically like a big sports bar, a clubhouse for passionate sports fans of emerging sports. And we’re absolutely in— we’re democratizing sports, making sports accessible to the super fans where it wasn’t before.
SCHLEY: I think the sports bar analogy is fire. That’s a really good idea.
RASENBERGER: Yeah, and I’ll tell you the other thing we’re doing. On top of that now, sports fans want community, they want interaction. So we’re creating on top of our apps, an SDK, an interactive layer on top through an SDK so that you can actually see multi-view of a particular event. Or you can do rewards, or you can do predictions — not betting on it, but you get availability to sports data. And we’re creating community interactivity features, so people can talk to other fans in their sport or in other sports.
SCHLEY: Are you, indeed, a Yankees fan?
RASENBERGER: I am, but not a passionate one.
SCHLEY: Okay, just checking.
RASENBERGER: Yeah.
SCHLEY: Your passion, though, you still have, I can tell in your voice, you’re still pretty jazzed about this business.
RASENBERGER: Oh, I love what I do. I love the way television has evolved. I think that it’s giving more opportunity to the viewer now, putting more control in the viewer’s hands. And it’s constantly evolving, and I think in my career, what has been maybe my key to my success is that I’ve always looked down the road at where the next change is going to be. And I’ve tried to position my clients for Rasenberger Media and myself to actually take advantage of those new opportunities, and I’ve done a pretty good job of it so far.-
SCHLEY: I would say so. If I am a client and I grew up in the legacy world of cable, linear cable, what are you going to tell — what are you going to advise me to do today?
RASENBERGER: Got to have a FAST strategy, and you’ve got to have a YouTube strategy, and you’ve got to have a social media strategy. You have to go where your fans and your viewers are.
SCHLEY: Where the action is.
RASENBERGER: And that’s ubiquity now. It used to be exclusivity; now content must be available to fans ubiquitously. Younger fans, the under 35, they do not watch — in sports, they don’t watch full games, they watch clips.
SCHLEY: I’m guilty. And I’m older than that but, yeah.
RASENBERGER: Right, but you have a younger son though, so you’re probably sharing your experience with him. But there’s a different type of viewer growing up in television, and it’s someone who doesn’t watch long form. Ninety-five percent have another device, of younger under 35, maybe two or three other devices going at once, so ubiquity is the name of the game. You’ve got to have a strategy to reach viewers through every single device.
SCHLEY: So a segue or a companion question is, if I want to play in television, if I want a career in television today, where do I start? I call up your company, or how I find an entrée?
RASENBERGER: Oh, let’s see, so it depends who you talk to. The world is moving more and more towards — YouTube now accounts for 13 and a half percent of all television viewing.
SCHLEY: Huge story, right.
RASENBERGER: And the direction content development is going is towards the creator, the individual creator.
SCHLEY: Absolutely, the infinite creator economy.
RASENBERGER: And it’s not hype, it’s happening. So even on my sports platform, I’m launching, developing and launching, some athlete influencer channels because they have huge social media followers.
SCHLEY: I get it, right.
RASENBERGER: And they can talk to their social media followers and bring them to our platform as well. We can tap into their brand power on YouTube on our FAST platform. And it’s a virtuous circle of fandom promoting one another.
What would my advice be? I always believe find a mentor, early stage. Find somebody like my Ed Bleier was for me, who taught me the basics of the business, who believed in me, and taught me basic skills. It’s still a skilled-based business. You’ve got to have a skill that’s valuable to whomever is hiring you.
SCHLEY: I love hearing that, in the world of looming AI, you know —
RASENBERGER: You have to be of value to the company that’s hiring you. So I find so many younger people want to instantly be at the top of the company or they want — it takes a lot of work to get to where I am and where you are today.
SCHLEY: Sure.
RASENBERGER: It didn’t happen overnight, and it takes a lot of skill and experience, and experience matters.
SCHLEY: When you look back on your career in cable and allied fields, besides earning a living, and congrats to us all when we were able to do that, what’s been fun about it?
RASENBERGER: Oh, the whole ride has been fun. I mean, I think the people I’ve met in this industry are among my best friends today, and they’re running every major company now. We all grew up in a business that was in the early, exciting days of development, and that was a thrill in itself. And I think watching the pivot and the transitions and staying on top of them. It’s a little bit like riding a tidal wave, you’ve got to be agile, you’ve got to adapt, and you’ve got to look at the long view and figure out what value you can bring to that ecosystem.
SCHLEY: Okay, good advice.
RASENBERGER: And, I mean, I had a skill that the industry needed at a time, but I saw the opportunity, and I seized the opportunity. You’ve got to have your antenna up and know where the opportunities are.
SCHLEY: I think that’s huge because I don’t think an outsider could have just parachuted in and did what you have done, and the —
RASENBERGER: Oh, no. No, no, no — the — I mean, it would have been very hard — First of all, I was hired because I had market intelligence that I had cultivated over many years. And outsiders who were trying to launch networks in the industry, even outsiders like MGM who had a library, or Universal Music that had a library, or Condé Nast that had a library, they hired me because they were outsiders to the cable industry and didn’t understand how to crack the code.
SCHLEY: Well, you have, indeed, cracked the code, and I think the imprint you’ve made on the business is pretty profound.
RASENBERGER: Well, thank you.
SCHLEY: So I want to just thank you for sharing a fascinating story and —
RASENBERGER: Thank you.
SCHLEY: — wish you well in the future. And for you guys who have tuned in, thank you for listening to this conversation. It’s been wonderful, and we will see you down the road. For the Syndeo Institute, I’m Stuart Schley.
