Los Angeles – Online celebrity news and entertainment site No Good TV (NGTV), backed by entertainment industry veterans including company chairman Gene Simmons, also of the rock band KISS, and Al Cafaro, music industry veteran and former chairman and CEO of A&M Records, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on February 25.
Kourosh Taj, co-president and head of programming, confirmed the news to DMW on Thursday in an email: “NGTV filed for chapter 11 protection primarily to implement a reorganization plan with the cooperation and consent of our senior secured lenders.â€
NGTV caters to the 18-34 demograpic and describes itself on the website as “the world’s largest producer of uncensored celebrity news and entertainment programming.â€
Headquartered in a 24,000 square foot production facility in Beverly Hills, NGTV boasts a 10,000-hour library of exclusive, uncensored originals, as well as ‘directors cut’
music videos. The company’s technology partners include Akamai, Brightcove, DoubleClick, Avid, Sun Microsystems, Digidesign, IBM and StorageTek.
NGTV videos have been very popular on YouTube and the company claims to be the third most-watched YouTube partner, with 445 millions views and counting.
In November 2008, Variety wrote that reality TV specialists Mark Burnett Prods. ("Survivor," "The Apprentice") became an equity partner in No Good TV when it entered into a partnership to develop some of NGTV’s privately-funded content into traditional television series.
"I have been very impressed with the fiscal responsibility exhibited by NGTV," Mark Burnett told Variety at the time. "It becomes very profitable for them to shoot a show for network or cable because the costs are low enough, even in a low ad market like this one."
NGTV has not revealed any details as to whether it plans to emerge from bankruptcy as a fully functioning company, if they are going to sell off assets or whether staff being are being laid off in connection with the reorganization.
Related links:
http://www.ngtv.com
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117995417.html?categoryid=14&cs=1
http://tinyurl.com/ygw2jhk (DMW previous coverage)
Is inconceivable that such a company had something to do with bankruptcy
i m very happy for some good news.
Alanya Emlak
That’s really scary, another giant company filling for bankruptcy, what on earth is going on? This is not just another financial crisis victim, the business seemed pretty strong to overcome it so it would be really interesting to know what went wrong this time.