When the Walt Disney Company bought the Family Channel from FOX in October 2001, the acquisition came with an unusual condition: two or three times a day, the cable channel now known as ABC Family Channel must provide time for the Christian evangelist Pat Robertson to air his religious talk show, The 700 Club. To understand the origin of this decree, one must look back to 1960, when a then-unknown Robertson bought a run-down UHF TV station in Portsmouth, Virginia, for $37,000 and called his operation the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). Robertson was a pioneer in satellite-delivered cable program- ming, since he saw that it was really the only way he could reach 60 million homes with his evangelical programming. CBN built its own satellite Earth station in 1977, bought $13 million worth of satellite time when it was sold cheaply, and began providing round-the- clock religious programming to a growing network of cable stations. By 1980 the Continental Broadcasting Network, an alternative name for CBN Cable, reached more than 5 million homes, and cable operators were paid eight cents a month per subscriber to provide the religious cable channel in their area.

Robertson financed the early days of his channel by allowing other religious broadcasters to buy his air- time, but the number of viewers was low. He then decided to boost his audience size by providing a broad channel of wholesome entertainment based on reruns of successful old shows from the 1960s and to get rid of all religious shows other than his own 700 Club, which received a boost in viewership when CBN made the format change. On August 1, 1968, CBN Cable changed its name to the Family Channel.

Two years later, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service forced CBN to sell its profitable subsidiary. Pat Robertson and his son Tim arranged a leveraged buy- out, with a new group, International Family Entertain- ment (IFE), purchasing the Family Channel from CBN for $250 million in cash and $43 million in program commitments. IFE was controlled and partially owned by Pat and Tim Robertson, and, under the terms of the sale, IFE and its successors were required to provide airtime for The 700 Club in perpetuity. It was good deal for everyone; CBN claimed that the transaction provided the company with $600 million in benefits (which included everything from cash to airtime), and IFE, brilliantly managed by Tim Robertson, Larry Dantzler, and John de Moose from Chrysler, soon be- came a profitable entity. Launched on the New York Stock Exchange in 1992, IFE became a publicly held $150 million company.

IFE flourished, buying a chain of theaters in the southern United States and starting the Games Channel, with a format of original game shows and reruns of such series as Crosswits, Let’s Make a Deal, and Truth or Consequences. IFE also began a cable Health Club Channel, with limited success. Tim Robertson’s most inspired move was to negotiate the 1993 acquisition of the United Kingdom operation Television South (TVS) for a modest $85 million. TVS had lost its license to broadcast in the ITV awards of 1992 but still had impressive holdings, including MTM Productions (which TVS had bought for approximately $285 million four years earlier) and Maidstone Studios, which IFE later sold for a profit. Ownership of MTM gave IFE not only the production company’s library of programs but also its production facilities in Los Angeles; in addition the TVS acquisition presented an opportunity to establish a British version of the Family Channel.

IFE grew into a variety of entertainment divisions, which included production, live-entertainment, and syndication groups. The MTM catalog provided the channel with such notable programs as The Bob Newhart Show, Lou Grant, and Evening Shade. IFE revenues rose from $242 million in 1994 to $273 mil- lion in 1995 to $315 million in 1996. Cable analyst Breck Wheeler suggested that IFE was “poised to ride a wave of worldwide cable system growth that will push demand for both original and syndicated programming.” Big groups like Disney and FOX looked toward the Family Channel as an attractive acquisition, while at the same time the Robertsons doubted whether they had the long-term capital resources to compete for new programming with the giants who surrounded them. For Pat Robertson, the real incentive to own the Family Channel remained its ability to carry The 700 Club to a nationwide audience; if the terms of any sale included the provision that the new owners must carry this show, he reasoned, why not sell? The issue then became who would pay the highest price, Disney or FOX?

In 1996 it was an Israeli entrepreneur with a huge library of cartoons for kids, Haim Saban of Saban Entertainment, who started serious negotiations to ac- quire IFE, with the enthusiastic backing of the FOX Children’s Network. The new company was called FOX Kids Worldwide, jointly owned by FOX Broad- casting and Saban Entertainment. FOX saw the merger as a necessary ingredient for future success in their worldwide expansion plans. Margaret Loesch, chief executive officer of FOX Kids Networks World- wide, was quoted as saying that, “Together, we are greater than the sum of our parts . . . . By bringing [Sa- ban] on board, it gives us an insurance policy and the tools we need to build a very strong international tele- vision company. I think it makes the difference be- tween success and failure.” In hindsight, the Saban presence did make a difference, but not the one for which Loesch had hoped: Saban’s total lack of cable programming experience doomed FOX Kids World- wide to relative failure.

Still, back in June 1997 Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of FOX’s parent company, News Corporation, was congratulated on his wisdom in buying IFE for the price of $1.9 billion. At that point, the Family Channel reached 59 million homes in the United States. Now known as FOX Family Worldwide, the channel thus provided the Saban/Murdoch team with a cable base of roughly equal standing to that of the two other main children’s cable enterprises in the United States: Viacom’s Nickelodeon channel (reaching 66.8 million homes at that time) and Time Warner’s Car- toon Network (cablecast in 28.3 million households). However, the good times promised did not materialize, for the audience accustomed to the Family Channel format did not like drastic changes in programming instituted by the new owners. Sinking ratings and rest- less affiliates led to an immediate crisis; within a month Saban removed FOX Kids founder and creative head Loesch from all operations.

IFE staff members left in droves, while Saban struggled desperately to stop the disintegration of his audience by hiring Rich Cronin, a 13-year Nickelodeon veteran, as FOX Family president, but Nickelodeon’s owners, MTV Networks, went to court and prevented Cronin from taking the position until his old contract terminated in July 1998. Tim Robertson stepped down from his duties as adviser to the network, and Saban was left without the guidance he needed. He decided to change everything he inherited from IFE and spent $100 million on promotion, promising another $125 million for 26 original movies.

Cronin only survived two years under Saban. By May 2000 ratings for FOX Family remained static at 0.3; viewing by children was up 6 percent, but the adult audience 18 to 49 years, a demographic so important to advertisers, declined 0.6 percent. The company lost $86 million and was forced to borrow $125 million from another News Corporation unit at a high interest rate of 20 percent. Saban and News Corporation denied they were looking to sell, but rumors abounded. Salvation for the ailing network came in July 2001, when Disney paid an amazing $5.3 billion ($3 billion in cash and $2.3 billion in assumed debt), an amount 32 times the annual cash flow generated from FOX Family’s 81 mil- lion basic-cable subscribers. Disney executives openly acknowledged that one way they expected to justify the high price was through license-fee hikes to operators.

Disney’s purpose in buying FOX Family Worldwide and renaming it ABC Family was to provide an outlet for “repurposed content.” In plainer language, Disney intends to repeat its programming from the ABC net- work and other Disney subsidiaries on the ABC Family Channel, a strategy some media analysts think can succeed. One thing remains from the old Family Channel days, however; whether Disney likes the program or not, The 700 Club is now carried by the ABC Family Channel. ABC Family Channel was rebranded as Freeform in 2015.