Another cable network has fallen victim to the rise of digital streaming. After only three years of broadcasting, Participant Media’s “Pivot TV” channel is shutting down.
An article by Vanity Fair had the details. Pivot was formed in 2013 as a result of the combination of Halogen TV and the Documentary Channel, both of which had been acquired by Participant Media. Participant, known for funding documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth and Food, Inc., created the network for a millennial audience, and the majority of its programming was meant to encourage social change and get people to “take action”.
Pivot’s programming included Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s crowd-sourced variety show HitRecord on TV, the Australian comedy Please Like Me, and the Artic-set drama Fortitude. Now that the network is being shut down, Participant will either be selling its programming to other networks, and/or moving them online to a digital platform.
In regards to why the network is being shutdown after only a few years on the air, Participant Media CEO David Linde had this to say: “Looking at the environment, we asked ourselves ‘Can we compete in this market as a stand-alone cable network?’ The answer was that we would not have been sufficiently competitive to achieve our larger ambition”.
Part of the problem is probably the fact that Pivot’s target audience of millennials are also the least likely demographic to actually own a cable-tv subscription, especially with the rising popularity of streaming sites like Hulu and Netflix.
Pivot will continue to show its programming until the fall, when it will officially “go dark”.