NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Jeff Skoll, the former eBay executive who is dedicated to solving the world’s big problems, has just taken a step to expand his movie company Participant Media – the company behind An Inconvenient Truth, Food Inc. and The Help — into cable TV. Skoll and Participant Media CEO Jim Berk announced Monday that Participant is purchasing two cable TV channels and will launch a Participant TV network in the summer of 2013, focusing on viewers age 18 to 34.

In an interview in June, Skoll told Forbes he wanted to make Participant Media a global media company and that negotiations to acquire a cable channel were ongoing. “Right now if we do 8 movies a year, that’s at most 16 hours of content. But if we’re on TV, you’re reaching people 24/7,” Skoll said over the summer. His rationale: more hours of content equals a greater chance of inspiring people to take action. “The goal of Participant is to tell stories that serve as catalysts for social change. With our television channel, we can bring those stories into the homes of our viewers every day,” Skoll said in a statement Monday.