VICE's New VICELAND Channel Promises to Remake Cable With Edgy Infomercials

As a business move, what's striking about the new VICE channel is the decision by a "new media" company to go in a direction that's demonstrably old.
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VICE may have a reputation as an edgy media bad boy, but these days its business couldn't be more mainstream. From the web to YouTube to HBO, Snapchat to print (yes, the magazine still exists!) to JetBlue, the VICE brand has become ubiquitous. So it's only natural that VICE would seek to extend its presence to a full-time home on television.

Today VICE officially revealed that it's partnering with A+E Networks to launch its own cable channel, VICELAND, in early 2016. The company says the channel will reach around 70 million homes.

"This network is the next step in the evolution of our brand and the first step in our global roll-out of networks around the world," said Shane Smith, VICE co-founder and CEO.

VICELAND will premiere with shows like Gaycation with Ellen Page and Ian Daniel and Huang’s World with Eddie Huang. The other titles all sound very VICE-ish, including VICE World Of Sports, Black Market, Weediquette, Flophouse, and Party Legends.

The development of many of the shows and the channel as a whole has been guided in part by Spike Jonze, the writer and director best known for Jackass and Her. "We wanted VICELAND to be different, to feel like everything on there has a reason to exist and a strong point of view," Jonze said.

As a key part of its strategy, VICE is promising to bring that point of view to the channel's ads, too.

"Drawing on VICE’s history as an innovator in branded content online, VICELAND plans to work with brand partners to re-imagine the nature of the television commercial too—making the commercial time a valuable extension of the entertainment programming itself," the company said in its press release. This is what is known as the "agency model," in which the creators of content work with advertisers to give the ads themselves a similar look and feel. And VICE has been a pioneer of this approach, at least in its current incarnation.

That said, cable channels with "a strong point of view" aren't exactly new. Nor are ads meant to double as entertainment. VICE may bring a new sensibility to the way it tells stories. But a cable channel that runs infomercials? As a business move, what's striking about the new VICE channel is the decision by a "new media" company to go in a direction that's demonstrably old.

Today old media giants like Disney, NBC, and CBS are preoccupied with trying to figure out how to capture the fickle attentions of younger audiences— what new media upstarts like VICE, BuzzFeed, and Snapchat do best. By embracing a more traditional medium, VICE is evincing an awareness that just because it's been part of the movement that's caused old media to scramble, disruption alone doesn't reach every possible audience member. Companies that can afford to do so will try to reach as many people as possible on as many mediums as possible. Today's media industry offers no certainties. So anyone who can is trying to do it all.