September 22, 2004 News & Views » Media notes

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More Than Bobcats 

C-SET readies for October launch

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Take a new NBA basketball team, hire TV staff, and stir. It's been a quick evolution from a press conference in March to now, as C-SET, the regional "sports and entertainment" cable network built around the Charlotte Bobcats, hits the air mid-October.

Naomi Travers, executive vice president of media rights and entertainment for the Bobcats and C-SET, said, "We are pushing hard to breathe life into it, (and) we've hired our staff heavily from local sports companies. We want to establish local color by using homegrown talent."

C-SET has been producing programming, hiring talent and staff, and signing deals with other sports properties to create programming beyond Bobcats basketball.

In months to come, viewers will see college conferences like the Southern and Big South, as well as South Carolina State and North Carolina A&T, which play one another in football November 20.

C-SET's temporary headquarters and video edit suites are uptown in the Bobcats' offices on West Trade Street, but the game plan is to eventually move into space near the new arena. For now, pre- and post-game shows will originate from a set-up at the current Charlotte Coliseum, but finding other studio space is also in works, possibly by sharing a facility with a Charlotte broadcaster, but no names are being mentioned.

As for Bobcats games, C-SET will carry 60 games, and 15 others will go to the local partner affiliate, WJZY. All the taped programs and live games will be fed to an Atlanta facility for distribution to the cable stations it must reach, either by satellite or fiber optics. But a reminder: C-SET can only be seen by Time Warner Cable digital subscribers. For now, C-SET is planning to program about 16-18 hours a day, filling in the blanks with ESPNews, and overnights devoted to infomercials.

Some of the original shows will be Bobcats GameNight, hosted by Tom Werme, and Bobcats Weekly, with play-by-play announcer Matt Devlin anchoring. These shows will take care of the nuts and bolts, pre- and post-game analysis stuff. What's off the beaten path are two "behind-the-scenes"-type reality shows. "The Pick is a show that has had a producer and camera crew following first-round draft pick Emeka Okafor for the past few months from NBA draft to Olympics, and will continue through his inaugural NBA season. Making The Cut will show the process of picking the Bobcats Dance Team, from competition to the lives of individual dancers. No word if coping with chafing from extremely short shorts will be an episode, however. Stay tuned.

E-mail at Shannon.Reichley@cln.com

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