The twenty-second international Disney Channel began beaming into homes across Hong Kong this month, nearly two years before the projected opening of Hong Kong Disneyland. Disney planned it that way, of course. The company needs to introduce itself to its new neighbors and what better way to say hello than with Disney Channel? After all, more than the theme parks, movies or any other branch of the Disney empire, Disney Channel is the single most prevalent form of Disney entertainment throughout the world. More people today know Disney through Disney Channel than anything else.

It’s Disney’s fastest-growing division, with a new Disney Channel launching somewhere around the globe about once every six months now. Last year, kids and adults in 63 countries watched over 600 million hours of it, turning its shows into hits and its stars into household names. Factor in the growing number of movies, albums and consumer products it’s generating, and it’s clear that Disney Channel is one of Disney’s most powerful components. But it hasn’t been that way for long. It was an entirely different story even ten years ago.

By the mid 1990s, The Disney Channel appeared to have lost its way, falling out of step with the company, and worse, much of its audience. It debuted in 1983 as a premium cable service with mostly homespun kid fare that appealed to parents too, a welcome concept that brought the channel tremendous success throughout the 80s with a fast-growing base of subscribers. But when recession hit at the end of the decade, subscribers began dropping the service with its pricey monthly fee. The Disney Channel’s programmers fought back by loading its schedule with more mature shows to attract adults, the ones who were paying that subscription fee every month, while hatching a plan to convert the channel from a premium cable service to a basic cable network.

But the conversion inched along, while The Disney Channel’s schedule was starting to suffer from a top-heavy load of nightly concerts and documentaries for the baby-boomer set, leaving the rest an uneven mix of period dramas and preschool and preteen series, many cheaply acquired from Canada. Disney’s television namesake was starting to more closely resemble a cross between PBS, VH1 and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and with so many scattered programs for so many different groups, it was unclear who was intended to be watching. Many younger viewers weren’t sticking around to find out. A generation of kids was turning Disney off, and tuning in elsewhere.

That all changed with the arrival of Anne Sweeney as the Disney Channel’s new president in 1996. A quiet woman with a roaring string of successes in television, Sweeney had previously spent 12 years as a fast-rising programmer at Nickelodeon, expanding that network into a dominant force in cable, and three years as head of FX Networks, where she launched fX in 1994. Now sharing the top post over Disney’s entire segment of broadcast and cable networks, Sweeney was brought onboard at Disney Channel with the directive to breathe life back into the tired network. She and her close-knit team of executives, led by her longtime colleague Rich Ross, delivered with a clear, well-laid strategy that not only revived Disney Channel, but transformed it into one of Disney’s most vibrant and dynamic divisions.