The young man on the in-line skates adjusts his helmet, checks his brightly colored elbow pads and looks into the U-shaped concrete stage below. Then, in a carefully choreographed routine, he rolls from one side of the half-pipe to the other, up and down the steep walls, executing a series of balletic turns, slides and somersaults. "Awesome!" yells the TV commentator, before turning his attention to an assessment of the young man's top tricks, which include moves with names like the Turn Grip and the Street Cleaner. "Way to go!"
While such a vocabulary is not a feature of mainstream sports coverage, it is common fare on the Extreme Sports Channel. And if everything goes according to plan, it will soon be heard in households across the globe.
The Extreme Sports Channel, which is a joint venture between the U.K.-based Extreme Group and the Dutch cable operator UPCtv, is a 24-hour sports network with both feature programs and live sports coverage from action, adventure and alternative sporting activities. Some of these sports, like beach volleyball and skateboarding, are fairly well known, and possibly don't sound all that extreme. But others — well, have you ever wondered how easy it might be to adapt a winter sled sport to new surroundings? Check out street luge. Are you keen to know the ins and outs of slalom and acrobatic hang gliding? Or are you too scared to look?
Some segments of the marketplace certainly aren't shying away. Since it first appeared in the Netherlands in May, 1999, the channel has launched in a further 18 European countries, ranging from Norway to Slovenia. "It's all about timing," says Alistair Gosling, 29, managing director of the Extreme Group. "We've been very lucky — the niche market is growing, and we're riding the wave." In just under two years of operation, Gosling says the channel has built a subscriber base of 7.9 million European homes. Next stop: Latin America, the U.S., Australia and India, in which the channel hopes to launch by the end of the year.
Just what gives extreme sports their appeal? "As a society, we are becoming more controlled, more disciplined and more routinized," says Dr. Ken Sheard, research director at the Centre for Research into Sport and Society at the U.K.'s University of Leicester. "People get vicarious satisfaction from other people taking risks." For those who are involved in the content of the channel, it's simply a matter of isolating an underground movement and tapping into it. "We're showing the activities that people of the younger generation engage in in their free time," says Stephen Cohen, the Amsterdam-based chief operating officer of UPCtv. "It's a matter of spotting trends, and when you walk down an empty city street after dark and see kids laying out little plastic cups so they can practice their in-line skating, you know there's something going on — something that has not been recognized by mainstream TV." The Extreme Sports Channel's target audience ranges in age from 12 to 34, but it's not just made up of guys who dream of skysurfing their days away. Some 40% of the channel's viewers are female.
Taking the Extreme Sports message to the world is a big ambition — and it's likely to be an expensive one. Gosling, an Englishman with a penchant for the great outdoors who formed the Extreme Group in 1995, estimates that in the U.S. alone, it will take $50 million over the next five years to build the channel. The company has mooted several ideas to raise funds — it may go for a partial float on the London Stock Exchange or bring in an outside investor.
The Extreme Group is currently valued at between about $75 and $110 million and gets revenue from both advertising and subscribers, according to Gosling, who owns 87% of the company but would not disclose annual turnover. It includes the channel as well as a retail outlet, and the company's website, www.extreme.com, which Gosling plans to develop into a destination portal for the online extreme sports community.
In the meantime, extreme sports lovers in Europe can keep themselves entertained by watching a spot of downhill mountainbiking, or extreme skydiving, on the small screen. Or there's the Extreme Games to look forward to, where participants gather to freestyle motorcross, or wakeboard. And for those who just can't get enough of in-line skating, there's the upcoming "Eat the Street" skatefest, when, from April 19-23, the channel will screen four hours daily of in-line skating contests, feature films — and special programs on tricks and stunts and how to do them. It's enough to get you off the couch.
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