You’re taking us back quite a few years, to 2004, when Nick Rhodes was pitching Casino Gaming Network Television. Former Fox Sports executive Rhodes told the Las Vegas Sun, "It’s a big market. They’re passionate about it." Such airtime that was not depicted to televising casino games would focus on amenities like casino spas, shows and restaurants. Rhodes calculated the potential viewing audience as bigger than that for fishing channels, tennis or even golf, which all had achieved dedicated outlets like the Golf Channel back then. With 53 million American gamblers, as opposed to 25 million golfers – and casino attendance that was triple that of Major League Baseball and minor-league games -- the math looked promising.
"We’re not buying rights from the NFL," said Rhodes, arguing that filming in Vegas would be an easy and cost-effective proposition. (Ironically, Cox Communications didn’t have the bandwidth in Vegas to carry additional programming at the time.)
There was already a Players Network but it was piped exclusively into hotel rooms and offered mostly instructional content. "I looked around [in 1989] and realized there was no media coverage around gaming," said founder Mark Bradley. "Right then and there, I decided I wanted to launch the gaming cable channel—the ESPN of gaming—but I also knew nobody was going to give a kid $100 million to start his own channel."
The Players Network never cracked the basic-cable glass ceiling but evolved into a video-on-demand behemoth, offering Vegas on Demand and Sexy Sin City TV over such platforms as Hulu, You Tube, Yahoo Video, as well as via overseas syndication.
In February 2014, Players Network filed suit against Comcast and its proposed takeover of NBC-TV, arguing that Comcast had "buried" the smaller channel by breaching its agreement to set aside six hours of pay-per-view time for the Players Network and "contrary to the promises Comcast made to the FCC, Comcast did discriminate against smaller channels such as Players Network, which is in violation of the Consent Decree."
Bradley’s current passion and focus is Weed TV, which he describes as "the go-to source for information, entertainment, products and services for people who relate to the marijuana lifestyle and social community." He hopes to soon have a WeedTV studio broadcasting from a Nevada medicinal-marijuana dispensary, along with "a vegan café called Munchies Healthy Gourmet, a media center and TV studio for education and entertainment content development that will be made available to accredited nonprofit organizations that want to create community outreach programs." Judging from its most recent business plan, Bradley’s company is pivoting away from gaming and focusing full-bore on the marijuana market.
LVA’s own Anthony Curtis has been approached in connection with several proposed, Vegas-centric shows but has shied away, in part because of the formidable startup costs, estimated at $200 million-plus. One such notion, The EdgeTV, went nowhere. Edge backer Reagan Silber’s business acumen can be measured by the fact that he purchased a $14 million stake in the doomed Bourbon Street casino, which was sold to Harrah’s Entertainment (and demolished) soon after.
But back to Rhodes, whose proposed formula was to carry blackjack, poker and billiards tournament play, and to show instructional programming on craps, roulette, etc. "Poker Royale" would air from The Orleans, "World Series of Blackjack II" was slated for the Golden Nugget and Santa Anita Park was to be the location of reality show (with interactive wagering) "American Dream Derby." (The latter became reality all right, but only for eight episodes on Game Show Network, which also became home to World Series of Blackjack.)
Co-founder Robert Carlsson predicted to Casino City Times, "Casinos and gaming companies are definitely going to want to advertise on this network. But we're not going to be the network of any specific casino. The same kinds of advertisers who are with ESPN will want to advertise with us -- financial-services companies, Visa, MasterCard, American Express, as well as beer companies. We’re not just going to be a gaming network, but [will] focus on the nightlife, the lifestyle and entertainment, too."
Despite $82 million in backing, Casino Gaming Network Television sputtered out almost as soon as it had been announced. "Why isn’t there a channel devoted to it," asked co-founder David Hawk. Because, it seems, you can’t get enough people to watch it. If you’re really hankering to place a bet over the airwaves, your only play (pun unintended) is TVG, which carries horse-racing action – and an online wagering application – from a plethora of tracks. Even GSN "did an about-face away from gambling shows," says Curtis. So if there was ever a moment for an all-gambling cable channel, that moment has passed.
