Who Wants To Buy The Travel Channel? Anyone? Bueller?

August 24, 2009 at 11:14 AM | by egw | 0 Comments

"Confessions of a Travel Writer" must have gone over even worse than we thought: According to the L.A. Times, Cox Communications is quietly selling off the Travel Channel, its only national cable network.

Cox grabbed the Travel Channel last year in a deal with Discovery, since which time its audience has grown some 35 percent among adults ages 25-54. (We'll call that the "Wistful Staycationers" cable package.) But insiders say Cox never wanted to be in the cable game, which is why it slapped a $700M price tag on the channel and is in talks with NBC Universal, News Corp. and Food Network owners Scripps.

But it's not too late to register your bid. Just think: For a cool $700 mil, Anthony Bourdain, Andrew Zimmern, Sam Brown and Adam "Man vs. Food" Richman can be yours. You could force them to all do hard labor in the Himalayas! Of course, they might not all stay with the network; Bourdain is a known moonlighter (we love his appearances on "Top Chef," a NBC/Universal show) and the rest of them, well, they're wild travelers; who can say.

[Photo: neeta_lind]

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