AZN BITES THE DUST

AZN, Comcast's Asian-American cable channel was the Death Star of Asian television content. With deep pockets and huge distribution it was set to basically blast the playing field with its mega-ton death ray and leave the other all-Asian channels (ImaginAsian and the assorted MTV Asian channels) reduced to little more than lightly smoking carbonized pellets. They were throwing sponsorship money around like candy and had greenlit lots of original programming that was being shot by nice people who loved children and animals.

Then, this past Monday, it got shut down.

Jeff Yang has an article on what happened here but the short story is that AZN's programming was all part of an elaborate financial transaction that required the company to keep it alive for a year in order to collect a cash windfall (around $545 million in tax free gold doubloons). The year is up and now the plug has been pulled and pretty much everyone has been laid off.

Comcast released the following statement:

"We are restructuring AZN to leverage consolidated network functions in Comcast's programming operations. As we complete this restructuring, we will continue to deliver high-quality programming for Asian Americans, and the programming and viewing experience will remain essentially unchanged."

Except, of course, there won't be any.