Industry Insider: Faith Bautista and the Launch of ChimeTV

Faith Bautista -Michael Bezjian

Thanks to the extraordinary success of Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) at the 95th Academy Awards, which swept seven Oscar wins out of eleven nominations as well as the first ever Asian woman winning in the Best Actress category, there is now a bigger resonance for an issue that has been running silent in Hollywood for many years: the under-representation of Asian Americans in media. The movie put the spotlight on a crucial conversation that was already turning into action in the TV space: on January 23rd, 2023, ChimeTV was launched, the first and only Asian-owned network channel that targets an Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) audience.

Founded and owned by philanthropist and entrepreneur Faith Bautista, ChimeTV is a 24-hour English-language channel that offers a broad selection of Asian-produced content, ranging from TV series to food, from lifestyle to sports - a staggering 70% of which is run in the US for the first time. While the channel’s primary target is the AAPI segment, ChimeTV has the greater goal of educating a larger audience to cultures that are otherwise largely under-represented in Western media. In fact, a 2021 study called The Prevalence and Portrayal of Asian and Pacific Islanders across 1,300 Popular Films (considered between 2007 and 2019) found that only an average of 5.9% of speaking characters were portrayed by AAPIs, and of those 1,300 movies, only 44 had an AAPI lead or co-lead.CHIME is the acronym for “Creating History In Media Entertainment”, and as the name suggests:

“ChimeTV's mission is to inform, empower, and inspire American audiences through Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) storytelling. This network exists to break down barriers, bring people together, and showcase the best of AAPI entertainment.”

The AAPI’s under-representation in media, however, suggests the presence of an untapped market: in fact, even though the Asian American population constitutes 7.2% in the US, only 2.7% of households that have a TV are Asian. Representation does matter, and a higher exposure and offer of target-specific content could possibly bring more Asian American households to get a TV screen in their homes. ChimeTV broadcasts via Spectrum Select TV, the brand name of the broadband connectivity company and cable operator Charter Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: CHTR) that reaches 32 million customers across 41 States; the capillary presence of the brand allows ChimeTV an immediate reach to its audience instead of a slow-roll distribution, with the potentiality of word-of-mouth as a driver for fast growth among the Asian population.

As outlined in its 2022 Annual Report, Spectrum is also very active in giving back to the community through various incentive programs, including low-cost loans through the Spectrum Community Investment Loan Fund, and technical assistant grants. These philanthropic endeavors perfectly align with Faith Bautista’s own efforts to assist under-served communities. In addition to being ChimeTV’s founder and CEO, Faith Bautista also founded the National Diversity Coalition (NDC), a nonprofit public benefit corporation that is present at many governmental levels to ensure advocacy for minorities and low-income communities. NDC’s mission is to “strengthen America and all its diverse communities through advocacy, collaboration, and economic empowerment.” Ms. Bautista is also the President and CEO of National Asian American Coalition (NAAC), another nonprofit organization that offers an array of funding programs that give financial aid to both privates and small businesses through graceful exit strategies for homeowners during foreclosures, loan modification and credit score improvements, down-payment assistance, and micro-loans and technical assistance to incentivize entrepreneurship among people with lower initial resources. It is thanks to these accomplishments that, in 2017, Faith Bautista was appointed by the Trump Administration to the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund Community Advisory Board, thus able to effectively influence governmental decisions first-hand.

The relationship with Spectrum and the media industry dates back to 2018, when Ms. Bautista started hosting the “Owning a Piece of America” TV show on Spectrum News 1. The show focused on spreading valuable financial knowledge “to inspire, motivate, and inform immigrants” on how to take advantage of their opportunities, and face challenges. It is probably the combination of the wide exposure that Ms. Bautista had to the financial problems of the AAPI community and the positive effect of media representation that, a few years later, brought to the conception launch of ChimeTV. In fact, when talking about it on a recent interview on Fox40 News, this is how Faith Bautista described the goal of the channel:

“We wanna be part of the society - we want the field to be even. So [ChimeTV] is just like any other channel that people would be watching, from food, travel, entertainment, informing [...] the American people through the immigrant stories of the Asian community.”