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By: peaksspeak
23 Feb 2006, 02:58 PM EST
Msg. 65461 of 65462
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Local News proves we are for real! READ>>>
Mountain Town Television
In Aspen, Media Is The Message
By Michael Conniff -
Aspen is no ordinary town, and the Mecca for megabucks has long been a kind of media hothouse—with two daily newspapers going head-to-head for decades, and three glossy magazines with “Aspen” in the title doing the bump.
Now Aspen is going to have two commercial television stations to call its own: the existing Aspen Plum, formerly owned by Aspen Skiing Co.; and, as of this week, a company controlled by Prime Rate Investors Inc. and allied as a new affiliate of the Resort Sports Network (RSN) carried on a Comcast Corp. cable channel in the Roaring Fork Valley.
Prime Rate, based in the ski town of Stowe, Vermont, announced that it had a deal with RSN and Comcast to bring affiliated stations to Aspen and Steamboat Springs. The new mountain-town properties will fit nicely with an RSN affiliate in the Adirondacks; existing RSN affiliated operations at the Stowe, Sugarbush and Smugglers’ Notch resorts in Vermont; a Vermont video production arm called High Angle Media Inc.; a majority interest in Stockli Ski USA, based in Denver, a distributor of skis, bicycles, and sportswear; and the Stowe-based ski retailer Skiershop Mountain Sports, an operation with a significant presence on the World Wide Web.
Prime Rate describes itself as “a multi-media holding company with interests in outdoor sports, e-tail, retail, print, web, television and film. The company's strategic relationships with multi-faceted, outdoor sports entities allow it to offer diverse advertising solutions to businesses seeking multi-media exposure.”
Aspen had been a bit of an orphan when it comes to television, with not a single network affiliate to be had from any closer than Grand Junction, and the maddening topography of the Roaring Fork Valley rendering over-the-air reception as a beam-me-up hallucinatory dream. GrassRoots TV, the local community access channel, pumps out a formidable array of government meetings and an impressive batch of local shows, but at the end of the daypart it’s still community television, with none of the bells and whistles viewers have come to expect from commercial television.
Local programming at Channel 16 was somnolent until this summer, mainly because SkiCo envisioned its local television station—an affiliate of RSN—as an extension of their marketing department. But when Plum came in, it cut ties to RSN, and that in turn left an opportunity on the table for Prime Rate to bust into the Aspen market as an RSN affiliate.
At least for now, Aspen will have to make do with the Aspen Daily News and the Aspen Times; Aspen Magazine, Aspen Sojourner, and Aspen Peak; Aspen Plum and the new RSN affiliate controlled by Prime Rate Investors; not to mention the new Aspen node of New West that told you all this.
When it comes to media investors, Aspen still looks marvelous.
