Participant Media Plans Its Own Cable Channel

Participant Media, the production company behind films like “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Food, Inc.” and “Waiting for ‘Superman,” said Monday that it planned to start a cable channel of its own by combining the assets of two obscure channels, the Documentary Channel and Halogen TV.

Participant said it was aiming to start the yet-unnamed channel next summer. Evan Shapiro, a former president of IFC and the Sundance Channel who joined the company last spring, will run the new channel.

“The goal of Participant is to tell stories that serve as catalysts for social change,” said Jeff Skoll, the founder of Participant. “With our television channel, we can bring those stories into the homes of our viewers every day.”

The channel could be a destination for documentaries made by Participant and other producers. Participant said it would also have original programming and named several people who are involved in making it, including Brian Graden, Brian Henson, Davis Guggenheim, Meghan McCain and Morgan Spurlock.

The channel will target viewers under the age of 35 - those, as Mr. Shapiro put in a news release Monday, that cable and satellite distributors are “most at risk of losing.” In other words: Participant might try to gain carriage for the channel by pitching it as a way for distributors to retain young subscribers. Distributors, however, are generally reluctant to carry new channels.

When it starts, the newly rebranded channel will already reach 40 million homes, Participant estimated, thanks to the channels it is acquiring. The company said Monday that it has completed a deal to acquire the Documentary Channel, which is available in about 25 million homes, and is working on a deal to take over Halogen TV's channel position in about 15 million homes.

The terms of the deals were not disclosed.

Among the many documentaries distributed by Participant was “Page One: Inside The New York Times,” a feature about The Times that was released last year. (Several reporters from the newspaper's media desk, including the one writing this article, were featured in the film.)