When I first read the news that I am about to report to you my first thought was “Could this be the beginning of maybe actually getting a nationally available horror channel on the air?”
Starz and IDT have merged to form a monster of a company. Read on for the details and then my thoughts will follow:
Less than four months after buying Anchor Bay Entertainment parent IDT Entertainment Group, Liberty Media Corp. Tuesday announced it is merging its IDT and Starz Entertainment Group subsidiaries into one entertainment group with a reach into all types of content and all kinds of distribution portals.
Production company IDT will now be known as Starz Media. The cable provider side of the business drops “Group” from its name and will be Starz Entertainment. Both will be under the Starz LLC corporate umbrella.
The new company structure has a DVD pipeline, a premium cable channel, a theatrical arm and a digital distribution sphere with Vongo, all of which are very important to have in place if you are going to produce or acquire content in today’s market, he said.
Anchor Bay Entertainment will continue to handle all home video product releases and will keep its name. However, it will operate, along with sister Manga Entertainment, under the Starz Home Entertainment banner.
The merger came about after new Liberty Media executives decided to convert the stock they owned in IDT Entertainment’s previous parent company, IDT Corp., a large telecom company, into “operating units” effectively selling its stock back to IDT Corp and taking the company’s entertainment arm in its place.
“[Starz] speaks [IDT Entertainment’s] language,” he said.” We are entirely complementary companies — there’s nothing they do that Starz also does.”
The new Starz Media company will continue to produce content. Starz produced the “Masters of Horror” series, which aired on cable competitor Showtime Networks and was brought to DVD by Anchor Bay. Starz is now producing “Masters of Science Fiction,” which will air on ABC and also be distributed on DVD by Anchor Bay.
The company will be looking at ways to take its programming to Starz’s video-on-demand service, Vongo, as well.
“Increasingly people are looking to the Internet for content,” Southwick said. “We think it’s going to be a complement to the way they watch TV.”
With Anchor Bay being such a driving force in bringing genre entertainment to the fans one could only hope that maybe an all horror programming channel from STARZ might soon be in the works. Mind you I have no confirmation of any such thing happening I am just thinking that perhaps it will just be the natural evolution of things.
With The Horror Channel appearing to be going all broadband and Fango TV kind of not talked about much anymore it would be awesome to see someone pick up the horror TV torch and run with it. I know you’re all going to ask me “what about MonstersHD?” Well, they are out there and quite awesome but man, is it hard to get. Of course it is only available on Dish Network and once you would make that change you have to have a special box and a special dish and then subscribe to their HD package and then subscribe to their VOOM package. Just a little too much work and expense for most people.
We need someone to come up with an easily available, affordable option for watching cutting edge horror programming and if anyone could do it, it would be Anchor Bay.
Lets cross our fingers and hope that someone with the power to make it happen does just that and this merger leads to something that all fans have been waiting to see for a very long time.
