AZN network faces challenge

Firm wants to be 'home base' for Asian-Americans

Joyzelle Davis, Rocky Mountain News

Published January 2, 2007 at midnight

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Kim Sam-Soon is a chubby, 30-something pastry chef who loses both her job and her boyfriend on Christmas Eve, and in her distraught state accidentally wanders into the men's restroom to sob.

And that's just the first 10 minutes.

My Lovely Sam-Soon was such a hit in South Korea that half of the nation's households tuned in to watch the July 2005 finale. Now Centennial-based AZN is hoping the Bridget Jones-esque drama will resonate throughout the Asian community in the U.S. as well, from Hindi-speaking Indians to Cantonese-language homes.

The network wants to be "a home base for all Asian-American households," said Bill Georges, AZN's senior vice president. "There's more in common with a South Asian-American home, a Chinese-American home and a Korean-American home than there is with a Caucasian-American home."

That kind of pan-Asian approach is modeled on Univision, the Spanish-language broadcasting giant that's credited with turning Puerto Rican, Mexican and Cuban audiences in the U.S. into one single Hispanic market. But Comcast-owned AZN has challenges that Univision didn't have to face.

Univision launched in the 1960s, decades before hundreds of channels competing for viewers and video over the Internet threatened to siphon away younger audiences. Hispanics also share a common language, while at least seven languages are spoken among the major Asian groups in the U.S.

AZN, the text-messaging shorthand for "Asian American," splits the difference by running all programming in English, which means that shows filmed in other languages are subtitled. But the greater unifying force comes from music videos, news shows and films that share the "core values" of the Asian-American community, Georges said.

The majority of the shows are acquired from overseas, although the network has ventured into a couple of original shows like Ivy Dreams, a docudrama following four high school students through the college application process, and Cinema AZN, an interview show with Asian film directors and stars.

A pan-Asian network is a relatively new concept and one that still generates controversy. While advertisers recognize the growing clout of Asian consumers, they're accustomed to targeting each nationality in its own language rather than as a culture, said Julia Huang, president of Long Beach, Calif.-based advertising firm interTrend Communications and head of industry group 3AF, The Asian American Advertising Foundation.

"For a lot of our member agencies, their bread and butter is the approach that the only way you can reach this market equals speaking the language. But more and more we are realizing that, before being language-centric, it's an insight-centric approach."

AZN, which launched in March 2005, evolved from the International Channel. Comcast acquired the International Channel a year earlier as part of a stock swap with Liberty Media, and at the time there was only one other startup network - ImaginAsian TV - targeting the same viewers.

The Asian-American market is a lucrative one for advertisers: There are 14 million Asians in the U.S., a number growing three times as fast as the overall U.S. population, with an average household income $12,000 above the overall average. The Denver area has roughly 126,000, making it the 19th-biggest Asian media market in the U.S., according to SRC DemosNow.

Given those numbers, it wasn't long before other networks had the same idea. By mid-2005, there were at least six Asian-American channels, including three from MTV targeting Chinese, Koreans and Indians in the U.S.

"It was almost the beginning of an Asian-American television age of enlightenment, or at least the blossoming of opportunity," said Jeff Yang, consumer strategist for New York-based Iconoculture. But nearly two years later, "it's a little sad to say that promise doesn't yet seem to have flourished," he said.

In December 2005, just nine months after AZN's launch, Comcast slashed AZN's staff at the Comcast Media Center by half to about 32. Comcast said the move was part of its strategy to eliminate duplicate back-office functions at its various cable networks.

Comcast also scaled back the network's ambitions to create its own shows. In doing so, Iconoclast's Yang says AZN lost a chance to establish its own identity, rather than airing shows that are often available on DVD or Internet file-sharing sites like BitTorrent before they hit AZN. "Original, compelling content that you can't find anywhere else is the secret sauce," Yang said.

AZN's Georges said the network is still interested in creating its own shows, pointing to Ivy Dreams, but said the network wants shows that Asian-American families can watch together. Shows like My Lovely Sam-Soon fit the bill. Dramas, which are the length of miniseries, are a key part of the so-called Korean Wave of movies and music that became pop-culture phenomena throughout Asia starting three years ago.

Whether the shows are clicking with U.S. households is harder to tell because AZN's reach, at 15 million U.S. households, is too small to be measured by Nielsen's rating system. Instead, AZN has to rely on focus groups and viewer e-mails for feedback.

Even with the backing of Comcast, AZN hasn't had much luck securing distribution on DirecTV and Dish Network. So AZN is beefing up its Internet offerings, launching shows like Sam-Soon weeks before they hit the network. It seems to be working: Web-site traffic hit an annual high of 67,000 unique visitors in September, when azntv.om started streaming the Korean drama All About Eve.

Going to the Internet makes sense, interTrend's Huang said, particularly to reach younger viewers.

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