WHEN IT WON'T FLY ON TV, SHIP IT TO THE WEB

BY SHIRLEY BRADY

Trio's edgy, provocative arts programming has been generating an earful of buzz lately. This month alone, the network earned a spot on Entertainment Weekly's ?It List? as ?the ?it? cable network,? a high five in Time magazine as ?a tiny, buzzed-about cable channel? [with] a canny strategy,? and a thumbs-up from the Wall Street Journal as the ?hidden gem? on the block with Vivendi's other U.S. entertainment assets, which includes sister networks USA and Sci Fi.

But besides winning props from the press and sweetening the pot for auction-bidders, the little-network-that-could has also been proving a winner on the Web. Now in almost 20 million homes via digital cable and satellite, Trio announced in May its plans to start streaming exclusive footage on Triotv.com.

The goal was to support its Uncensored Comedy month in June, which featured such programming as Uncensored Comedy: That's Not Funny!, an original documentary hosted by comic Susie Essman, who plays the potty-mouthed wife of agent Jeff Greene on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The website streamed outtakes from the month's lineup of shows, including jokes from another documentary, Sick Humor, whose adult language and content were considered too raunchy for TV.

?Perfect Web content is like perfect DVD added-value [content],? says Trio president Lauren Zalaznick. ?You can promote it, it will drive people there, some number of people will check out that added content, but everyone feels better knowing that it's there if you want it.?

The network also enticed visitors to its website by posting an online petition to posthumously pardon the late comic Lenny Bruce, who was convicted of committing obscenity during a 1964 performance in New York City. The idea was to educate viewers about Bruce's history of artistic persecution while promoting the June 2 premiere of the original documentary, Lenny Bruce: Uncensored, on Trio.

The two-pronged lure of the TV/Web programming strategy has paid off, with the supplemental online material driving viewers to the Web for more while sating those who expect uncensored to mean unblurred or as is.

?We're not ashamed to drop audio during Uncensored because the idea of censorship that we talk about is the censorship of fundamental ideas and artistic freedom,? Zalaznick says. ?I make a distinction between that and the FCC, which doesn't censor but has rules. By being a television [network] I'm saying I'm going to play by those rules. If I didn't want to play by those rules, I'd stand on the street corner and play tapes of Lenny Bruce? ? instead of offering Trio's viewers a documentary explaining Bruce's groundbreaking battles against the censors.

Trio is still unrated by Nielsen, so audience figures aren't available for the themed Uncensored Comedy programming, which aired throughout last month.

But this much is certain: Online page views to Triotv.com more than tripled in June over a year ago ? from about 233,000 to nearly 752,000. The number of unique visitors increased by 75%, while the number of registered website users grew sixfold to 30,000 adults 18 and over, as required in order to access the online material.

With its mandate to treat the arts with respect but not make them deadly dull in the process, VH1 veteran Zalaznick is now pondering her next step as she builds the Trio brand.

The Triotv.com streaming first started in earnest with the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls month in March, ?where we almost had too much good stuff,? says Zalaznick of the lead-up to streaming Uncensored-related content online. ?It's a boon to me to be able to put on the screen, ?check out TrioTV.com.? You get a lot of stuff. You don't get more triple X-rated, you get more of the interview with Bernie Mac or Dennis Miller, and you get truly unshowable, raw, raw, raw intellectual-but-base comedy from the likes of Bill Hicks. It may not be that funny, but it's part of his canon and it's part of the integrity of the [Uncensored] month, and to that end that streaming additional content really helps me.?

She is carefully weighing the network's expansion into the video-on-demand or subscription broadband space, as the Independent Film Channel is doing with IFC on Demand and its recently announced broadband subscription product, Uncensored on Demand ? two services from Rainbow Media that might appear tailor-made to Trio's content.

Offering VOD and exclusive broadband content might also boost Trio's appeal to cable operators and help speed the growth in its subscriber ranks, which Kagan World Media estimates is on track to double by 2007. But Zalaznick isn't biting. At least, not yet.

?Everyone's interested in providing this kind of service to consumers, but because there is this giant middleman, the cable operator, it is not as simple as just providing the content as we do for our TV,? she says. ?Convergence is without a doubt the win for the future. Cable operators have got to combat churn, and one of the few proven directions is when they bundle broadband and cable ? plus soon to be HD, VOD, telephony, whatever the next wave is. With channels like Trio they will have the most success. With Trio, you get stuff all day every day that you cannot get without the digital box. With our content and super-serving the consumer with the next platforms of interactive television, on demand and HD, you start to get the complete package.?

But she still feels the timing is not quite right to parlay her content into VOD and broadband.

?I don't want to create a great offering with nowhere to put it,? she says. ?Yes, we will have to provide VOD content, but the means by which to get it efficiently and effectively to the consumer just isn't there yet, and [so] there's no set time frame. I want to wait until there's critical mass. I bet we will [make an announcement] in the next couple of months.

There have been some announcements from other channels that I don't want to make?that's building fake industry buzz. I want to come out with a real product and I want to do it with a partner. And that we're not ready to talk about.?

In the meantime, the Trio team is busy ramping up marketing for its new prime-time strategy starting this fall. Starting Labor Day, Trio will enhance its 9 Sharp nightly doc block with a new strip of Brilliant, But Cancelled never-seen pilots, move the Sessions at West 54th series earlier to 7 p.m., while classic Letterman will continue at 10 p.m.

?What our marketing does is give a very big picture idea of the feeling you're going to get when you tune in. It does not concentrate on ?Watch this show on Tuesday at 9 for these eight weeks and see this star in this role,?? she says. ?I do say, ?If you watch all month long, any time, you will see something like this and get this kind of feeling, which is energetic, modern, new, can't get it anywhere else.??

The goal is to market ?our own brand attributes, as opposed to a single slice of the product pie,? she adds. ?It's risky, because you do have to have shows, you do have to have actual things to connect to for one hour or one half-hour in a series. So we do have that?but the thing that gets you in the door is marketing and advertising.?

So while buzz may come and buzz may go, Zalaznick and her team will continue refining Trio's programming and brand identity in the viewer's mind.

?This summer's programming is not that vastly different than what we did last summer, but we have gotten better at what we're doing,? she says. ?It was a very new team last year, I've only been here for 13 months, and I was truly thrown into the first big programming and marketing initiative that Trio had ever attempted. My sights have been set on pretty much the same target for this whole time ? but we just get better at shooting the bow and arrow each time we aim for that target.?