Travel Channel is our biggest opportunity for growth says Scripps CEO

Scripps Networks CEO Ken Lowe said the company feels the Travel Channel is “probably our single biggest opportunity” in terms of growth over the next couple of years, and programming investment will continue to ramp up. In Q3, Travel Channel generated about $69 million in revenue, up from about $63 million in 2011. Lowe said Travel, which is in about 94 million homes, “could easily, in my opinion, be a top-15 network.”

Multichannel: Lowe said the priority for the next few years will be to boost Travel’s hours of programming – at between 400 and 450 hours per year it airs about half the 850 annual hours of HGTV and Food. “It takes awhile to build a brand. Plenty of people never imagined Food would be a top 10 network,” Lowe said.