Our Story

At the beginning of every year, Gary Lico, the president and CEO of CABLEready, writes the goals he has for the company on a white board in his office. “It’s almost like a touchstone, whatever we write, it happens,” says Lico. “If we say, here are the original programs that we want to launch, they get launched. A year ago we said we wanted to add more finished programming [to our catalogue] and we got that.”

Whether or not the board has any magical powers that give a helpful push to Lico’s plans, one thing is certain: Lico has based his business on the power of knowledge—knowing his product very well, conveying that to his clients, and being very familiar with the needs of his buyers.

In fact, Lico built his company on the expertise he acquired in the U.S. syndication market. In the early ’90s he realized the nascent cable networks were underserved. “They were not getting the kind of programming that they needed from the studios and my feeling was that there were other sources of programming that could be tapped.” He set up CABLEready in 1992. “The foundation of the company was built on two things: finding out more about the programming [we were distributing] and making sure we tell the story of each program well, in a way that makes buyers understand how it meets their needs.”

Lico made CABLEready’s first sale just six weeks after the company launched, with Nickelodeon picking up the children’s show CAPPELLI AND COMPANY. That was followed by sales of other series to A&E and Travel Channel. Shortly thereafter, Lico met a college professor who was holding seminars and Lico was asked if the sessions could be the basis of a TV program. “After watching a rudimentary tape of one of the seminars, we thought, ‘Yeah, we think we can sell this.’ ” The seminars became the well-known and critically acclaimed series INSIDE THE ACTORS STUDIO, which allowed Lico to get into original programming. “It also became the driving program of our international business,” he says.

At about the same time, a chance meeting evolved into a turning point for CABLEready. “I was hired for a day-long consulting session at a small production company in Pennsylvania that was doing medical inserts for newscasts, but they wanted to do something bigger,” explains Lico. He suggested doing a series on forensic science and the show became MEDICAL DETECTIVES, which has run for 12 seasons and by the end of 2008 will total nearly 350 episodes.

“That put us into the development business, where we were working with producers to help them flesh out ideas, develop them and put them into cohesive form for sale. This is what makes us different from most other companies. We’re more than a distributor because we develop ideas. We’re less than a producer because we’re not involved in production. But if you give us raw footage, we will help you put together a pilot or a presentation tape, so this is the sort of hybrid company that we’ve become.”

CABLEready has grown into a leading supplier of factual programming and its catalogue contains a range of series that can meet the varying needs of buyers around the world—from FORENSIC FILES for truTV, to BILLION DOLLAR DISASTERS and HOUSE OF BABIES for Discovery, to THE DIRECTORS for Starz Encore, to GIGANTO and MONSTERQUEST for The History Channel, and ACCIDENT INVESTIGATOR for Discovery Health.

CABLEready also represents the entire catalog from New York Times, including several medical vérité series such as TRAUMA: Life in the E.R. and MATERNITY WARD; and powerful investigative documentaries including INDONESIA: Struggle for the Soul of Islam, THE PERFECT WAR, and the THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN REPORTING specials. Other key suppliers for CABLEready are Lionsgate, The Weather Channel and truTV.

In September 2009 CABLEready announced another major distribution deal. Following CABLEready’s sale of the iconic biographical series THE DIRECTORS to ReelzChannel, the cable network chose CABLEready as the international distributor for some of the channel’s key entertainment programs including HOLLYWOOD DAILIES, MOVIES AND MUSIC, SECRET’S OUT, SPOTLIGHT and WHAT I LEARNED FROM THE MOVIES.

In recent years, the success of CABLEready has allowed the company to seize new opportunities. In 2006, Lico and managing partner Lou Occhicone started sister company CableU, an online, subscription-based cable network research service that serves the entire industry.” Since the beginning, we’ve always prided ourselves, and attributed our success as a distributor, on the amount of preparation and information gathering we do on behalf of our clients,” said Lico. “It reached a point where we said, “there’s no one else doing this amount of research and everyone in the industry could benefit from it.” From this, CableU was born to distribute vital research information to networks and content producers around the world.

In 2009 that same vision and entrepreneurial spirit that has now led CABLEready to be honored as the only TV company among INC. 5000’s fastest growing companies for the past three years gave birth to CABLEready Productions, meeting the industry’s demand for state-of-the-art corporate video, editing, duplication, standards conversion and audio services.

The white board in Lico’s office is covered with goals for 2010. An optimist at heart, he loves his work as much today as he did when he first started in the business. “Life’s a journey, not a destination,” he says, and he welcomes whatever new stops are in store for CABLEready this year.