Even as the day of the digital switch dawned, questions remained. From viewers: "Do I really have to get a converter box?" From local stations: "Do we really need a 24/7 weather sub-channel?" And from industry analysts: "Do new profits really follow new bandwidth?" Henry Luken has an answer to the third question--and soon, he says, he'll have four digital networks to make his case.

Until recently, broadcasting was a peripheral business interest for Luken, who already co-owns mega-yacht-builder Christensen Shipyards, owns telecommunications company Covista, and owns a prime slice of Chattanooga's commercial real estate. Last year, he was a major shareholder and chairman of the board for Little Rock, Ark.-based Equity Media, when he was tapped as CEO to salvage the foundering company. He couldn't fix Equity from the inside, he says, so he resigned his post and paid $25 million for what he considered its most viable component, Retro Television Network (RTN). Created primarily to air on broadcast digital sub-channels, RTN offered core programming of chestnuts like Leave It to Beaver padded with talk shows and infomercials.

Luken's transition to media ownership was inauspicious. As Equity went bankrupt, RTN lost its Equity-owned affiliates--and, briefly, its national feed. Undeterred, Luken relocated RTN's operations to Chattanooga and began rebuilding the network's affiliate base.

In the process, he refined RTN's format, using a strategy based on a combination of expedience and gut instinct. He scrapped Equity's planned "fresh talk" programming--"There are too many risks that somebody will say something that I don't want to have to deal with," he explains--and invested in more historic hits like I Spy and Columbo . "Basically, we pick out what I think people would want to watch on TV," he says.

On the day of the digital switch, Luken re-launched RTN as RTV, with more than 80% of the country under contract. Then he turned his attention to three more planned networks: sports-focused TUFF TV; PBJ, for children; and an RTV2. He says he'll run them on broadcast channels, which he predicts will pull budget-minded viewers away from paid programming options. Ultimately, he hopes to launch as many as 10 networks from Chattanooga.

Michael Malone, deputy editor of Broadcasting & Cable magazine, says the new availability of digital bandwidth is creating plenty of outlets for new programming, but so far it's been "kind of a land grab. No one exactly knows what the business model is, yet. I don't think anybody's getting a lot of eyeballs. They see it as a potential thing. [No more] than a handful of stations, if any, are turning it into considerable revenue."

For Henry Luken, there's no question about that potential.

"A year from now, you should have 25 to 30 different sets of content on the air in a market the size of Chattanooga," Luken says. "There's an awful lot of people who could watch 25 channels and be perfectly happy, instead of paying 60 bucks a month for basic cable."

He's banking on that.