Gospel Music Channel is cable’s fastest-growing

By 316Networks.com

Published: November 01, 2009

From his little studio and offices in East Point, the son of one of America's early televangelists launched the squeaky clean Gospel Music Channel, potentially reaching more than 1 million homes with its first broadcast in October 2004.

In the years since, Charley Humbard and his investors can claim that what's been called "MTV for Christians" has been the fastest-growing cable channel, now with 46.7 million subscribers, according to SNLKagan, a media research and analysis firm.

GMC finished ahead of TeenNick, which added 44.7 million subscribers, and NBA TV, which added 39.8 million during those years, according to SNLKagan research.

"They've grown pretty dramatically in number of subscribers," said Derek Baine, a senior analyst at SNLKagan.

He estimates its income shot up as well. From 2007 to 2008, GMC's advertising revenue went from $6.5 million to $13.5 million, Baine believes.

The channel, privately owned by investors Humbard spent two years assembling after he walked away from a career at the Discovery Channel, does not release earnings.

But it's no secret that since its earliest days, television has provided a living for the Humbard family.

Humbard's father was the guitar-strumming, singing preacher Rex Humbard, who started his TV show in 1952.

He added his four children as singers and musicians and then his grandchildren by the mid-1960s. At the height of its popularity in the 1970s, more than 1,000 U.S. and foreign stations carried the "Cathedral of Tomorrow" broadcast.

"As Dad said, 'If you don't sing, you don't eat,' " Humbard said. "He said that lightly, but we got it."

Humbard, now 48, and his sister Elizabeth appeared in their first TV special when he was 7 and she was 10. "Elizabeth and Charley Visit the Holy Land," he said, was a six-week shoot in Jerusalem and other sites from Jesus' life.

Humbard left his father's show before its demise in the 1980s and parlayed backstage skills into a successful career in secular TV. He worked his way to a senior vice president at Discovery Channel before the appeal of music led to Gospel Music Channel.

GMC offers music videos in every style from high church to hip-hop, talk shows and insider reports. But music - mostly gospel and Christian - is the channel's soul and the ingredient that allowed Humbard to put his heart into it.

"It is very deep in all of us," Humbard said. "You know how a song can do - a song can take you to a place, a time, and make you think about something totally different. It can make you excited, make you angry. It can make you energized. It is a combination of the gift of language and the gift of sound. I think it speaks to us."

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