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| TV star and producer Mark Bunting is Orbis’ new owner. |
For the third time in its 20 year history, Orbis Broadcasting has been sold ? this time to an individual with ties to Chicago who plans to add a new product line while retaining Orbis’ base medical, broadcasting and production business.
Buyer is Mark Bunting who bought the half medical, half broadcast production company from parent Health Answers (originally HealthWays Communications International) of Dallas for an undisclosed price.
The sale does not include the four-floor West Loop building, which had been sold two years earlier.
Dallas-based Bunting owns Sky Inflight Television Production Services that provides script-to-screen videos for United Airlines.
Bunting was host of “The Computer Guy,” TV’s first syndicated show on computer technology in 1991, branching out into commercials, infomercials and other Bob Vila-like activities. “I bootstrap-built the TV company from zero and sold it to Ziff Davis for $72 million,” he said.
The Bunting-Orbis connection may have stemmed from both sharing United Airlines as a client.
Asked why he bought Chicago-based Orbis, Bunting called it “a wonderful investment opportunity with the potential of greater sales.”
Focus will continue to exploit Orbis’ core competency of medical information, “but we will bring in new blood and resources and grow it into something bigger,” Bunting declared.
Although he is not ready to discuss the particulars of impending changes, Bunting said, in keeping with “a need for leadership change,” a new president will be named shortly. Other senior management will be brought in from outside the company but will not replace existing staffers.
At one time, Orbis had reported gross sales of $15 million and employed 75 at its peak, when 50% of its business was medical, and the rest production of in-flight videos and syndicated TV shows. Present staff numbers around 30.
Jeff Bohnson, one of the original founders, and president of the Medical Answers-owned company, is said to have been brought back to Chicago from Hong Kong to ready the company ready for a sale. Bohnson has left the company.
Bohnson, a former American Medical Association in-house video specialist, and Gary Chang (who left a few years later) started Orbis with the AMA’s blessings and its business that lasted for many years. In 1991, Tim Bahr and David Manilow bought into Orbis and sold it in 1999 to HealthWays Communications.
The building had been developed as studios and offices for Telemation of Glenview. Television sold to Home Shopping Network, which occupied part of the offices until Orbis acquired the entire space and bought the building.
See www.markbunting.com.
