Warner Brothers Television, a producer of prime-time series for broadcast networks, is now targeting cable television with lower cost prime time series.
The company announced it is creating a unit — to be called Warner Horizon Television — to generate series specifically for cable TV networks.
The goal will be to find ways to produce series, both scripted shows and reality shows, for much less than they generally cost on broadcast network television.
Ad-supported cable channels have much smaller production budgets than broadcast networks and have never paid anything close to what networks pay for shows. An hour-long network show generally costs $1.5 million to $2 million an episode, the New York Times said.
Warner Horizon shows for cable networks would have to be produced at “a significantly lower cost” than that. The budgets would have to be $400,000 to $500,000 less per episode, which means using new or less expensive talent on these shows.
