As Playback goes to press, there are some things we know about Super Channel, the new pay service set to launch Nov. 2, and there are things we don't.

Let's start with what we do know. We know that specialty television veteran Malcolm Knox, president and COO of the start-up, is not getting all that much sleep these days, as he prepares for the most ambitious undertaking of his career - the on-air launch, from a standing start, of the first pay licence to be awarded in two decades.

We can check out the Super Channel website (www.superchannel.ca), national ads should be about, and the on-air branding, programming and schedules are coming together.

In an exclusive interview, Knox offers us a sneak peek of the service itself. He describes Super Channel as "an entertainment service" offering a broad range of programming on six channels - two high def (HD) and four standard def (SD).

Flagship channels HD1 and SD1, which will have mirrored schedules, will carry premieres and major movies. SD2 will be guy-oriented, offering extreme sports, anime, horror, gaming and edgy documentaries. SD3 will be more female-oriented, with Bollywood Saturday night, and foreign and art-house films, and SD4 will feature exclusively Canadian fare. The second high-def channel will be a compilation of HD-available programming from the others.

We know, surveying the press releases, that the service settled on the Super Channel name as recently as Oct. 2. It was referred to as the one-word Superchannel up until and including Oct. 1.

There's a lot of history in that name. Super Channel is owned by Edmonton-based Allarco Entertainment, which is controlled by chairman and CEO Charles Allard, scion of Dr. Charles Allard, who in 1982 launched an early Canadian pay service called Superchannel. Allard's company was acquired by WIC Western International Communications in 1994. In the late '90s, the company was broken up, and Superchannel went to Corus Entertainment, which then rebranded it as Movie Central. Knox was the service's VP of Edmonton operations at the time.

"It's not about the history," Knox says regarding the new service's familiar moniker. Instead, he calls Super Channel "simply the best choice" to describe what the service is offering. He declined to name the other candidates, except to say, "The world of naming is a very complicated thing. You think you've come up with a wonderful name and you find out that someone in France is using it as a photocopier."

So Super Channel it is.

On to unknowns. We wondered if there is enough quality programming out there that's not already tied up by incumbents (and former duopoly holders) The Movie Network and Movie Central, and whether the entrée of Super Channel will increase programming prices.

Knox assures that "there's absolutely enough programming to go around." In Canada, he points out, there will be three pay services including Super Channel (two, if you take into account that TMN and MC share programming and split the country between them), while in the U.S. there are more than 40 pay channels.