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The Digital Research Initiative The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Olympia Media operates a diversified group
of broadcast, cable operations and newspapers in the mid-South,
but is best known for its recent success in establishing cable
networks. The company operates a broadcast group of radio and
television stations, all in mid-South cities: Norfolk and Roanoke
in Virginia; Charlotte, and Raleigh in North Carolina, and in
Columbia, South Carolina. It has newspapers in Greenville, S.C.,
Winston Salem, Norfolk and Roanoke. The company's cable operations
are mostly in northern Georgia and coastal South Carolina, with
its largest system serving Myrtle Beach and Charleston. It has
about 400,000 subscribers. Nationally, Olympia is best known for its Climate Channel, which reaches over 80 per cent of cable homes with national and local weather services. The company is also known for its Family Values Channel which reaches an even larger audience with a wholesome menu of reruns, mostly westerns, sit coms and family movies that are especially appealing in rural communities. A third channel, the Voyager Channel, dedicated to travel and travel advertising, has been struggling to gain distribution due to channel capacity problems.
Most of the managers of the company's various
divisions have established Internet services and homepages. The
newspapers have been most enthusiastic, primarily for defensive
reasons, as they fear that telephone companies and cable operators
may use the net to compete for classified advertising revenues.
Publishers once hoped to generate substantial ad revenues and
subscription fees through on line services, but have been disappointed.
Recently, they have grown very concerned about Microsoft's motives
in establishing local information services on the net through
its Cityscape service.
The cable networks have established home
pages to help promote viewing, and possibly to provide interactive
ad possibilities for some advertisers. Managers of the Voyager
and Climate Channels have had some discussions with Microsoft
about an alliance patterned on the NBC/Microsoft MSNBC model.
They hope to use Microsoft on the net to gain revenues for specialized
weather and travel services, advertising and transactions; and
to benefit from cross promotion between net browsers and cable
viewers.
Some of the television stations have home
pages for promotional purposes, but see little revenue potential.
Two general managers are opening discussions with Warner Bros.
about CityWeb, a syndicated web service for tv stations. Radio
general managers are more bullish, however, and see revenue potential
in working with companies like Audionet, that use the Internet
to enable distant listeners to tune into radio sports broadcasts
and other programs in dozens of markets.
The manager who is most enthusiastic about
web potential heads the company's cable operations. The cable
manager foresees substantial revenues from leasing cable modems
to subscribers anxious to gain high speed connections to the Internet.
The cable systems manager has explored working with established
Internet services like Interpath or Mindspring. This could work
well for Olympia's cable systems in coastal South Carolina, which
are currently being upgraded for greater bandwidth. However,
it may be too costly to upgrade the other mostly rural systems
of Olympia sufficiently to provide digital services and cable
modems. In fact, the CEO has worried that the scope of Olympia's
cable operations may not justify the capital required to upgrade
them, especially with competition from DBS mounting. Two major
cable corporations have recently approached Olympia, offering
to buy the cable systems. Back to the Main Olympia Page
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