"Two years ago, Viacom considered and abandoned at cable channel cable network aimed at gays. The company now considers that a big mistake, Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone thinks it would have cost $30 million to launch a channel that could now be worth $1 billion. So Viacom is looking at the possibility again. But it is uncertain how popular such a channel would be outside major cities (obviously the only place homosexuals watch TV). The driver, of course, is that advertisers are increasingly attracted to gays who spend nearly $500 billion a year. But not much is known about "gay" viewing habits, Nielsen has never studied them. Some prominent gay television executives and producers worry that gay viewers might resent narrowly focused programming choices as attempts to pigeonhole them. "The gay community is extremely diverse, [and] some would even say fragmented," says Kirk Iwanoski, vice president of marketing at the Sundance Channel.
"If you're going to go out there and make the claim that you're the gay network, you're going to have to cover multiple aspects of the gay community."
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Joe Flint at joe.flint at wsj.com]