On the (Country) Airwith RFD-TVOmaha's television network reaches 30 million homes with "good old family entertainment." Story by Molly Garriott |
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PATRICK GOTTSCH had a job installing satellite dishes when he made an observation that would one day change his life. Working in Omaha and surrounding rural areas in the 1980s, he realized that his customers were missing something. Where were the programs about agriculture and rural life? What happened to traditional country music? Gottsch found that people were hungry for what he calls “good old family entertainment.”
“When I grew up on a farm in Elkhorn, there was a lot of ag and rural programming on TV,” he said. The noon market report, ag report and Farm Family of the Week were all aired on local network news programs. That kind of coverage diminished over the years; if local networks still aired it at all, it was buried at 4 a.m. or some other “low rent” time slot.
Later, Gottsch moved to Fort Worth, Texas, and worked at Superior Livestock Auction, a video cattle auction. He saw that ranchers and farmers readily used video to do business. The business thrived. Gottsch reasoned that rural-oriented entertainment and news would appeal to the same kind of people.
So he made a business plan for launching a rural channel. At first, potential investors weren’t interested. Rural America was on the decline, they said; nobody wanted to watch ag reports, horse shows or programs about farm machinery.
Ignoring the naysayers, Gottsch launched RFD-TV in December 2000 on Direct TV and Dish Network. The network’s name stands for Rural Free Delivery, the Postal Service program that, 120 years ago, began delivering mail to rural addresses.
It helped that Willie Nelson was not among the skeptics. Gottsch called Nelson’s publicist to pitch the idea for the network. “I hung up thinking I’d never hear from him,” Gottsch said. “Thirty minutes later Willie Nelson was on the phone. He invited me on his tour bus to explain the ideas.”
Nelson, who owned the rights to many classic Nashville shows through the Willie Nelson Act IV Library, was so enthusiastic about what Gottsch was trying to do that he gave RFD-TV the rights to air these programs free of charge.
The naysayers, it turned out, were wrong because they underestimated the potential audience which grew as satellite dishes became more affordable and more rural residents began using them. Ten years after its founding, the Omaha and Nashville-based RFD-TV reaches 40 million homes and has successfully courted Time-Warner, Comcast, Cox and other cable and satellite providers to air its programming. It’s a media David and Goliath story.