"It was a fantastic opportunity to take someone who supplies us with some of our largest and most spectacular specials every year and create a partnership that allows them to have a great output source and gives us a great input.
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"We've always viewed the BBC as a great partner and a great supplier," Campbell asserts. To further buttress that international beachhead in the UK, Discovery and the BBC formed a partnership in 1998 to create new programming and cable channels worldwide. That's the great thing about exploration and science and nature it has universal appeal." "He was always excited about content that would be what we refer to as 'platform neutral,' so that it aired on any channel around the world.
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"I don't think that John ever envisioned the company being what it is today," Campbell notes.
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The programming in the early years was all acquisitions, but in 1989 Discovery commissioned its first original program, Ivory Wars (Philip Cayford, dir./prod.), which aired in September of that year.Īlso in 1989, Discovery launched Discovery Networks International in the UK, marking the beginning of a worldwide endeavor. The program, which aired in 1987, earned Discovery its first award, an ACE (now CableACE) Award for Cable Excellence. Subsequent programming included Russia: Live from the Inside (Ken Schaffer and Marina Albee, prods./dirs.), a satellite transmission of Soviet-era television, as the Soviets saw it. Bob Hutt, prod.), a 1980 production from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and National Film Board of Canada. On June 17, 1985, Discovery aired Iceberg Alley (Peter d'Entremont, dir./prod./wtr. The process to raise the seed money for the launch took about three years, with funding coming first from Allen and Company, then from a consortium of cable operators that included TCI (now Liberty Media), Cox Communications (now Cox Enterprises), Advance Newhouse and United Cable. I think then and today his and our mutual goal and mission is to provide the audience, as well as our filmmakers, with a home for great documentary filmmaking." He loved documentaries and he thought there should be a channel devoted to great documentarians and their visions and their passions. According to Billy Campbell, president of Discovery Networks, US, John Hendricks' inspiration for starting up the channel "was actually very straightforward and quite wonderfully simple. Twenty years later, the Discovery Network is an empire of 14 channels, including Discovery Channel, that collectively reach 1.2 billion subscribers in 160 countries, and the world is a very different place.ĭiscovery's story is one of opportunity and good timing. When the Discovery Channel first launched in 1985 with 156,000 subscribers, the Cold War was in full bloom, Apple had introduced its first Macintosh just a year earlier, mullets and Madonna dominated pop culture and high-carb diets were in.