Michelle Rice
Executive Vice President of Affiliate Sales & Marketing
Michelle Rice is Executive Vice President of Affiliate Sales & Marketing. In this role, she develops distribution strategy and helps manage negotiations to increase and maximize TV One’s corporate distribution opportunities, manages corporate affiliate relationships and oversees field sales for the entertainment and lifestyle network targeting African American adults. She joined TV One in January 2004 as vice president of distribution strategy and operations and was named a senior vice president in March 2005.
Before joining TV One, she was Northeast regional vice president for affiliate relations and national accounts for iNDemand in New York. At iNDemand, she was responsible for affiliate sales and local marketing efforts in the Northeastern United States, including negotiating and implementing the company’s affiliation agreements for carriage of pay-per-view, video-on-demand, event, and HD channels. She also negotiated carriage deals for subscription sports package partners, including the NBA League Pass, NHL Center Ice, MLB Extra Innings, NASCAR-iN-Car and ESPN packages.
Before joining iNDemand in 2001, she spent five years at NBC Cable Networks, most recently as director of affiliate sales/special markets, where she was responsible for distribution of CNBC, MSNBC, and Shop NBC to special market accounts, including DirecTV and Echostar.
She began her cable industry career through the Walter Kaitz Fellowship program at BET in 1993, where she served as manager, special markets and Canada in the network’s affiliate sales department.
A graduate of Temple University with a degree in journalism, Rice also holds an M.A. degree in communication management from the University of Southern California. Michelle is also a Class 8 alumnus of Women in Cable and Telecommunications’ prestigious Betsy Magness Program.
Launched in January 2004, TV One (www.tvoneonline.com) serves 25.7 million subscribers, offering a broad range of lifestyle and entertainment-oriented original programming, classic series, movies, fashion and music designed to entertain, inform and inspire a diverse audience of adult African American viewers. TV One’s investors include Radio One [NASDAQ: ROIA and ROIAK; www.radio-one.com], the largest radio company that primarily targets African American and urban listeners; Comcast Corporation [NASDAQ: CMCSA and CMCSK; www.comcast.com], the leading cable television company in the country; The DirecTV Group; Constellation Ventures; Syndicated Communications; Pacesetter Capital Group; and Opportunity Capital Partners.
