Reading about John Malone’s and Shelia Johnson’s journeys gave me perspective on two great company builders and the rise of Black Entertainment Television (BET). Two things stood out about the company’s early days.

BET was founded in 1979, when the cable programming market was young. New satellite technology and outlawing pirated broadcast signals caused demand for programming to explode.

Per Johnson’s book, Malone acquired a cable system in Memphis, Tennessee, which had a roughly 40% Black population at the time. He needed cheap programming that resonated with the city’s Black audience. Bob Johnson, BET’s cofounder, knew Malone. Bob got permission to repurpose a proposal for a cable channel targeting elderly people. He then changed “elderly” to “Black” and pitched Malone. Malone loved the idea. He invested $180,000 for 20% ownership and loaned an additional $320,000.

At launch in January 1980, BET broadcast movie reruns during a two-hour time slot every Friday. It was a start, but not enough. Programming hours had to expand for the company to survive, and reruns couldn’t be the only programming.  

Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN) launched in 1979 and had early success broadcasting college basketball games. BET noticed that ESPN didn’t broadcast the games of Black colleges. BET decided to fill this gap and began broadcasting Black colleges’ basketball and football games. Programming expanded to six hours per week, but that still wasn’t enough.

In 1981, MTV launched. Consumer demand for music videos skyrocketed. Every artist wanted their video on cable TV. But MTV executives wouldn’t play videos from most Black artists. BET saw this “big cultural gap” in music videos as an opportunity. Artists’ desire for exposure on cable TV made creating music video programming cheap. And strong consumer demand for videos translated into strong viewership. BET saw filling the music video gap as a win for BET, artists, and consumers. In 1981, BET launched Video Soul, which aired for fifteen years.

Music videos and college sports helped BET find product–market fit. Things were going so well that in 1982, BET sold 20% of the company to Taft Broadcasting Company for $1 million. By the fall of 1984, less than four years after launching, BET had 24-hour-a-day programming, 18 million subscribers, and more than 36 employees.

BET’s early success boiled down to two strategic things:

• Cloning – BET didn’t try to reinvent the wheel. Instead, it took ideas that others had proven were viable, cloned them, and applied them to market gaps.
• Market – BET was early in the cable programming market, which grew rapidly. A rising tide lifts all boats. In BET’s case, the market was moving so fast that it yanked BET along. BET made a lot of mistakes early on, but being early in a growing market meant those mistakes weren’t deadly.

BET was a massive financial success for John Malone and Sheila Johnson. It’s interesting to see how two simple strategies, taken seriously, were central to their early success.