Opinion ID: 769374
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Channel's Status as a New Business

Text: 43 To evade the Kenford I analysis, Schonfeld argues that the district court should not have characterized the Channel as a new business. He emphasizes that he and the Hilliard brothers were experienced cable channel operators and BBC news programming has been distributed around the world for many years. Accordingly, he claims that the Channel is more analogous to the introduction in Ashland of a new but tested investment strategy by an existing financial management corporation with an extensive customer base. This argument is unpersuasive. 44 It is undisputed that the Channel's operating entity never saw the light of day. Had the entity been created, it would have introduced first an existing product, BBC international news programming, and then a new product, the Americanized version, into a new market, the United States. In addition, the Channel had no established customer base. The Hilliards had only 66,000 subscribers and Russ Hilliard testified that they were having trouble finding the 500,000 subscribers necessary to preclude the BBC from terminating the March Supply Agreement. Finally, the Hilliards, Schonfeld and the BBC had never jointly operated a cable channel, so there is no historic record of operations from which lost profits could be projected. Therefore, the district court correctly determined that the Channel would have been a new business.