thestar.com

CMT's [Hal Willis] says he initially assumed his channel "would have to sell the music and the culture" but quickly found that what was on CMT was so technically excellent compared to much European television fare that "they like the programming and then get sold on the music and culture."

In putting its signal in the air to reach the U.K., CMT picked up approximately 250,000 homes in Scandinavia, where Willis expects to "eventually" get into another "couple of million" homes. Recently, CMT has gone into about 2 million additional homes in the U.K. via small "dish" antennas. Outside the U.K., he says, cable penetration is much more widespread. In the Benelux countries, for example, cable penetration is above 90 per cent, but the process of getting onto systems there has been "a little slow" because "each community has its own committee that meets once a year and decides what goes on the cable."

One of Willis' high-priority European targets is Germany, where CMT already is on some cable systems in the formerly Communist eastern area. A corporate sister of Nashville's historic Acuff-Rose music-publishing firm, CMT learned through incoming royalty statements that Germany was a large user of Acuff-Rose songs.