Dog TV plans to expand and charge $4.99 a month
Gilad Neumann wants to be clear: He does not want to turn your dog into a couch potato. But if you're going out for a few hours, he hopes that soon you'll leave your television on and tuned to his new cable channel, Dog TV, the first channel directly targeting canine viewers.
"Veterinary associations like the Humane Society and the ASPCA have been recommending for dog owners to leave the TV or radio on when they leave their dog home alone for many hours," said Neumann, Dog TV's founder and chief executive officer. However, he said, "not every video that you leave your dog with is appropriate." Anything that contains fireworks or gunfire could scare your dog and "create more stress than no TV."
Dog TV's programming, on the other hand, is meant to soothe your dog's abandonment anxiety - and spare your furniture - while he or she is alone.
Dog TV went live Feb. 12 after four years of dog-market research and several hundred thousand dollars of pre-seed money (Neumann won't give a specific amount). For now, it's available only to Time Warner Cable and Cox Media customers in the dog-loving city of San Diego, a test market of about 1 million cable subscribers.
Jasmine Group, the Israeli production company behind Dog TV, hopes to expand across the United States by the end of the year, and start charging a premium of $4.99 per month. The company believes this is a small price for absentee dog owners to pay to assuage their guilt - especially compared with doggy day care rates, which can range from $40 to $50.
Watch a few minutes of Dog TV - a beagle and a Pekingese cavorting in a field set to cheery Muzak, say - and you'd be forgiven for confusing it with the Puppy Channel, the terminally cute, all-puppies-all-the-time experiment that hit its peak in the late '90s before becoming a casualty of the dot-com bust and setting a daunting precedent for other dog-centric programming.
But a lot has changed in the last decade, both in entertainment and in man-pet relations: There are an increasing number of pampering products and services that extend human comforts to dogs, from gourmet food to therapy. And Dog TV, after all, isn't for humans. For one thing, the colors will seem off, because they've been calibrated to suit dogs' limited vision. (Essentially color-blind, dogs can only see shades of blue and yellow.)
"We're constantly doing ... you can call them focus groups for groups for dogs," said Neumann. "We've noticed, for example, that dogs are not thrilled about barking on the channel, so we've removed almost all barking."
The content is relatively cheap to produce: Videos are shot largely in San Diego and Israel, canine actors don't need to be paid, there are no elaborate sets, and the veterinarian-approved music is written and performed in-house. Short segments play throughout the day and are designed to alternately soothe and stimulate the viewer.
There are, as yet, no plans to air dog sitcoms, dog procedurals, or any form of narrative content.
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Dog TV plans to expand and charge $4.99 a month