[1] Typically run on a lesser budget, national multicast services often rely on archive and imported content and are tailored to allow advertisers to reach specific demographics.
It was not until 2009 that commercial broadcasters were allowed to add multichannels; in that year, the three major networks all did so, bringing the number of channels they offered from three to eleven.
[2] However, after the Australian Communications and Media Authority permitted the commercial broadcasters to move required children's programming and national drama commitments to their multichannels, ratings and visibility fell precipitously; by 2013, the ABC had more viewers for its children's channels than the commercial broadcasters combined.
The first such subchannel was the 69 News Weather Channel, launched in February 2001 by WFMZ-TV in Allentown, Pennsylvania, with the assistance of AccuWeather.
[9] Another planned subchannel of this type, the .2 Network, was announced and signed up affiliates but never launched amid the Great Recession.
[16] Weigel launched MeTV, which had formerly only been a local service in Chicago and Milwaukee, on a national basis in December 2010; four years later, it was the most widely distributed multicast network.
[17] It remains the most-watched; in 2021, it had an average prime time audience of 752,000, nearly double the next-highest diginet and greater than cable channels such as Bravo, Lifetime, and A&E.
[19] The business was also maturing significantly due to the rise of cord cutting, enabling some services to make a profit off advertising.
The purchase was notable for adding four diginets: the women-aimed Escape (now Ion Mystery), the men-targeted Grit, Bounce TV to serve the African-American/Black market, and the comedy-focused channel Laff.
[23] Further, the use of more efficient generations of MPEG-2 encoders by TV stations allowed for the transmission of additional subchannels from the same transmitter; a representative for Harmonic, a seller of encoders, noted that stations were seeing a return on their investment within less than a year from the additional revenue stream opened up by adding another diginet.