Soul of the South is an African American television network, dedicated to becoming your #1 global source for African American movie entertainment and visual culture.

Long before I had the idea for Soul of The South, I (Doug), began working in the entertainment industry out in LA. After a short period of time, I was asked to join Casablanca Records & Filmworks, run by the iconic media executive Peter Guber. I spent several years as a corporate executive alongside Peter & his team, working on some of the biggest motion pictures of the day and learning from truly the best in the industry.

One of the critically acclaimed films that I produced, New Jack City, became such a success that I began to get a lot of attention as an African American executive producer & director. I have always wanted to showcase the hidden and oft-forgotten stories of our heritage as African Americans. And so New Jack City was the beginning of my life’s work, culminating today with Soul of The South; a piece of home; an African American visual entertainment company.

Soul of the South

Several years ago we started Soul of The South with cable TV programming across sports, news, food and history, all focusing on black culture. Some of our viewer's current favorite programs are:

Soul Cinema

Primarily we have been in African-American heavy TV markets across America. That is to say, we were a traditional over-the-air television (OTA) station. But over the years we have evolved into a leading African American movie & documentary entertainment company. In 2019, Soul of the South began an effort to significantly expand our film programming lineup to over 300 African American films designed to support our goal of serving the top black markets.

Soul Cinema is broken into four periods. The First Period is known as “Race Films Period”. This covers the beginning of Black Cinema up and to including World War II. The Second Period is the ‘Civil Rights or Assimilation Period”. Films took on POV of returning Black Soldiers from WWII and Korea who believed if they were good enough to die for the USA they were good enough to enjoy their full rights as citizens. The Third Period is referred to as the “Blaxploitation Period”, the filmmakers largely children of the WWII generation and product of the Civil Rights Era made films characterized by Black empowerment and romanticized visions of Black America. The Fourth Period is referred to as the “New Black Film Period” and began largely with “hip hop influenced film, broad-based comedies, and social/heightened realism such as “Boys N the Hood”, “New Jack City” and “Coming to America” and continues up to and including films popular among the AA Demo today such as Tyler Perry.

In this new era we are moving into the FAST channel space, which means that soon you’ll be able to watch Soul of the South programming no matter where you live or how you stream your TV-based media. Fast Channels – “Free ad-supported streaming TV” - like Soul of the South, are made available through OTT (Over-The-Top) network providers. OTT providers are the names we know well, such as Pluto, Samsung TV, Tubi, Redbox, Peacock, etc., and the physical “sticks, boxes, and TVs” such as Vizio, Roku, Sling, Apple TV, etc.

Southern Soul Stories

An ongoing series about the stories that unite us. The shared stories of our history, our heroes, and our heritage.

DC Breakdown

A new kind of political talk show. A program with a “perspective” both Southern and cultural, broadcast from our nation’s capital in Washington DC.

Great Gospel Morning

Every morning, a two-hour show that combines joyous gospel music, inspiring feature stories, and interviews.

Early this year, we officially launched our FAST channel arm of Soul of The South, through the 2nd largest TV producer in the world. If you own a TCL TV set with the FAST channel coding worked in you will now have access to all of the Soul of the South programming.

Over the next few years, and as a core part of this raise, we’ll be expanding to many of the top OTT provider platforms, such as Roku, Tubi, Redbox and so many more. We hired a couple of key companies with proven track records of getting FAST channels onto the OTT platforms quickly and successfully. We signed a deal with Amagi last November, who will distribute Soul of The South channels to most of the OTT platforms, such as Sling, TCL, etc. To get into the bigger platforms such as YouTube TV, Netflix, etc. we brought on Loc Sondheim and her team, who brought the World Poker Tour to the world through the largest OTT providers globally.

One-third of our viewer base is actually not of African American heritage and we see through market research & viewer demand, a great opportunity to reach audiences globally who are interested in learning about our deep African American heritage. This is good news since our revenue model in both the OTA and FAST Channel spaces is CPM advertising.

Ads are platform automated and our revenue scales infinitely as we gain viewership! But this requires a ton of pre-launch work to set up pre-determined “commercial breaks” within each and every movie and show that we plan to air. We’ve made the upfront investment already in building a searchable metadata library of keywords, thumbnails and artwork, within a deep & proven lineup of movies & shows. We wanted to ensure that when we go live through OTT providers, we hit on all cylinders, and have the ability to scale with every new viewer.

We know that we have the chops & connections to grow this brand, and to show that African American movies serviced across a dedicated FAST channel is a lucrative business model. We also know that larger brands such as Sony, BET (Black Entertainment Television), among a few others are better situated to then take Soul of the South programming to the highest level that it deserves. That is to say, our goal is to find the right acquirer - which will be a bigger media company - that wants to put more African American content into its infrastructure. In order to accomplish this we have to develop these new FAST channel revenue streams because once that is in place, a larger organization can simply take it’s massive sales & marketing force and bring these stories to a wider audience. You may be asking: Are you the team to take Soul of The South to a successful acquisition? We are certain that we are. Let me start with my own background.

Global Media & Entertainment Leadership

In my role as President and CEO of Soul of South, I lead the company’s vision and strategic partnerships, as well as develop and implement plans for future growth. I hold a BA in Economics from Stanford University where I served as its first African American Student Body President, and have grown my education with a JD/MBA from Harvard Law and Business Schools.

As a business/legal affairs and creative executive with Peter Guber’s Casablanca Record and Filmworks, Polygram Films, VP of Production at Quincy Jones’s Grio Entertainment ad Head of Television for Avco Embassy Pictures I come to this position with immense experience in developing, growing & marketing media. I’ve been responsible for producing and/or directing over twenty African American films and hundreds of hours of prime-time television, including 1⁄2 hour television series, one-hour variety series, and two-hour made-for-television movies.

I co-founded the iconic Elephant Walk Entertainment, a production and management company that made successful film and TV entertainment content for most of Hollywood’s major studios including Warner Bros, Twentieth Century Fox, new Line Cinema, and Sony Pictures Entertainment; generating $1 Billion in world wide gross revenues.

Soul of the South is majority owned by me, with key managers holding most of the remaining ownership, such as my co-founder & right-hand operations lead, Jeff Norman. While our operations include a master control and origination facility currently based in Kansas City, the company is operated by a small core team that strategically focuses on outsourcing key initiatives to the worlds leading mega-media firms. Some of our core media partners are: Amagi, who has established itself as the cloud-based technology pioneer and leader in enabling TV Networks and content owners to launch, manage, distribute, and monetize OTT, FAST channels worldwide. Worldlink Ventures is one of the early leaders of the direct response advertising space, and they head up out ad-supported television service, which is our primary source of revenue. We’ve also recently commenced an effort to secure branded national tv advertising where Soul of the South can utilize its National Minority Supplier Development Council certification to support these sales efforts. And most recently we’ve brought on Loc Sondheim of World Poker Tour fame to enter SSN into contracts with, and onboard us to, the largest OTT platforms globally.

Join Our Team, As an Owner

We have self-funded the majority of our early R&D, show & movie production, and viewer growth, as we believe deeply in what we are accomplishing with SSN. Most recently in January 2022, the company secured a $135,000 debt loan from Pacific Community Ventures and has taken on a few smaller $5K - $10K convertible debt notes over the years from passionate friends and past colleagues.

This will be our first real equity raise and we couldn’t be more thrilled to bring you, our current and future viewers, on board to grow with us financially! Our $500K raise is set to support near-term expansion and operating needs and take advantage of the appetite for cross-over branded African American content in the marketplace. Specifically, we look to put:

• $150K toward Operations (i.e. - people needed to make things happen)
• $70K toward Content Acquisition (where we purchase classic movies & documentaries produced by world-class teams)
• $30K toward Production (the behind the scenes CAPEX work of keyword dev, metadata, commercial breaks and searchability)
• $50K toward Marketing (once onboarded to OTT platforms we will expand awareness of SSN to push viewership, leading to revenue growth)

We are building Soul of the South so that we can prove that there is a financially viable pathway for our collective stories to be told. Then we will let a larger organization bring the current, and new, stories to a larger, broader audience.

This is a mission-driven investment, with an iconic team, strong financials, and a shorter ROI projection than a normal startup.

Join us. We’d love to have you on board.