How goes PrideVision’s uphill battle to broadcast its gay-oriented programming south of the border?

Not too well, despite unflagging optimism on the part of the beleaguered Toronto-based diginet.

‘We can’t give a date yet because we’re still working on a plan to secure partnership,’ says Wendy Donnan, director of programming and operations. ‘But we’re hoping to launch in the U.S. within the next year.’

Donnan declines to discuss the venture in detail, but it looks like she has her work cut out for her.

According to a recent issue of Variety, private-equity funding for new channel startups in the States has dried up, and a recent U.S. expansion attempt was thwarted because PrideVision couldn’t raise enough capital to pay steep U.S. launch fees.

Meanwhile, cable operators have all but stopped signing new networks while they wait to see if Washington and the courts will force them to carry all of the digital signals that local broadcast stations put together.

The fear is that such forced carriage would swamp digital bandwidth to the point of forcing out underperforming cable networks.