5Qs with Inspiration Nets COO Bill Airy

DISH and DirecTV launch your flagship channel Wed, more than doubling your distribution to 54mln+ homes. What does that broader base allow you to do? We’ve never had satellite distribution before, so it gives us the ability to reach an entirely new community of people. Inspiration Nets has created some opportunities over the years that have been exclusive to cable. Does this signal an end to that? It was almost by virtue of the fact that we were cable exclusive. The things that we did to support subscriber campaigns and that kind of thing can still occur. They may not occur in a completely exclusive environment, but certainly we very highly value our relationship with our cable partners. In fact, we’re looking at ways to extend our relationship with the cable community from the standpoint of developing new business opportunities between us. For example, the new Canoe Project that’s underway. We fully intend to be a part of that. We’ve already started doing some things with MSOs to take advantage of some of the new technologies. Inspiration Nets has been outspoken in the past on a la carte. Are you still passionate about it? We firmly believe that a la carte is one of the worst ideas that anybody has ever come up with, and we’ll continue to do whatever we can to fight a la carte. How are your other nets doing—i-Lifetv and La Familia? We’re seeing continued growth for i-Lifetv. We have high expectations for growth in the cable industry as well as perhaps in the DBS community. It is a completely different business model. We have license fee revenue, and we have ad revenue. It’s currently in about 10mln cable HHs. La Familia continues to grow. It’s in about 700K homes now. It’s a family friendly alternative to the mainstay in Hispanic programming, which is dominated by telenovelas. There has been a push by some independent programmers for the FCC to streamline rules that protect independent networks from illegal program carriage decisions. Your thoughts? Our feeling is that for the most part it’s a level playing field. We have to be able to market our products on the basis of their attributes.