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Love a Mystery? It's Elementary: Tune in to Sleuth

Posted on: Thursday, 3 November 2005, 06:00 CST

By Laura Petrecca

NBC Universal is betting that crime pays.

On Jan. 1, the media giant will roll out Sleuth, a cable channel dedicated to murder, mystery and mayhem. By tapping the extensive NBC Universal library, Sleuth will serve up 24/7 programming that includes throwback TV shows -- such as The A-Team, Miami Vice and Knight Rider -- as well as edgier movies -- ranging from such violent fare as Scarface to spy thrillers such as The Jackal.

While crime can be big TV business -- NBC Universal's Law & Order franchise, for example, is a huge moneymaker -- Sleuth will have a modest start: It'll be available initially to just 5 million subscribers to Time Warner Cable's digital service.

That's a mere sliver of the 70 million or so U.S. cable households and a small chunk of the approximately 27million homes that have digital cable, says Yankee Group analyst Adi Kishore.

That means viewers shouldn't look for the lucrative Law & Order variations on the new channel anytime soon. Current seasons are still running on NBC, while reruns of Law & Order are a staple on Time Warner's TNT network, and Law & Order SVU is a big hitter in the lineup of NBC Universal's USA network.

Media experts say NBC Universal's timing is right with the all-crime, all-the-time approach.

"This genre is very, very popular right now," says Brad Adgate, research director at Horizon Media.

By recycling the vast programming library created from the May 2004 merger of NBC and Vivendi Universal Entertainment, Sleuth is relatively low-risk.

"It's really cheap to operate," says Northwestern University media professor Lawrence Lichty.

The venture has an upside in ad support. In adding Sleuth to a broadcast and cable network universe that includes NBC, Telemundo, Bravo and USA, NBC Universal gains a "cross-selling opportunity" with another option to meet diverse advertiser needs, says Kishore.

By being targeted to 25-to-54-year-olds, the channel isn't expected to pull in many big-spending advertisers initially. That age demographic skews slightly higher than marketers' sweet spot of ages 18 to 34. And the limited household access will hamper sales.

"You have to hit certain distribution levels before advertisers get really interested," NBC Universal Cable Entertainment President Jeff Gaspin acknowledges.

But the concept piqued the interest of some media buyers. "We'd consider it," says Tim Spengler of Initiative Media, who says advertisers like whodunits. "They retain audience because viewers want to watch the entire show to see how the mystery ends."

The challenge for NBC Universal is to convince media buyers that its new channel will offer something different from Court TV and the slew of other crime and suspense programming on cable.

Gaspin concedes that crime and suspense shows are "fairly ubiquitous" but says Sleuth will have a leg up since it'll be the only "major channel that concentrates on this through-scripted material."

NBC Universal has ambitious plans to get more distribution to have more to offer advertisers. It hopes to make further inroads to homes by offering the shows on video on demand through Time Warner in 2006. It's also in talks with other cable operators about distributing Sleuth through digital cable, VOD and/or high definition.

"We're in discussions with a lot of other distributors," says NBC Universal Cable President David Zaslav. "We're hoping by launch that we'll have additional deals in place."

(c) Copyright 2005 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

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