Chip, Joanna, and Their HGTV Contract’s Non-Compete Provision

I spent my Thanksgiving fretting about net neutrality, so I thought for my first blog entry back from the holiday I’d let us indulge in a bit of speculation about Chip and Joanna Gaines and their future plans. My love for HGTV is well-known to my Contracts students, as I am constantly mining it for hypos, so I read with interest this Vanity Fair piece stating that Chip and Joanna from “Fixer Upper” have pitched another show to other networks. The article notes that Chip and Joanna’s contract with HGTV’s parent company probably prohibits them from doing another home-improvement show for another network, so it speculates that they’re pitching some other type of show, possibly a talk show. 

Would you watch Chip and Joanna do a non-home-improvement show? What kind of show? And do you think networks will successfully negotiate for broader non-competes to keep their stars off competing networks altogether in the future?