Don Cornelius, founder of the once-famed music and dance program Soul Train has sold the show to MadVision Entertainment, an LA-based company backed by PE firm InterMedia Partners. The iconic franchise, founded in 1970 by Cornelius, includes the brand and the production rights for the weekly Soul Train series (not in production anymore), along with a catalog of about 1,100 hours of archival footage spanning the show’s long 37-year run.

Soul Train continues to air in syndication today in repeats, and MadVision wants to take the brand on multiple platforms, including broadband and VOD. The founder of MadVision include Kenard Gibbs, the group publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines; Anthony Maddox, who worked as a producer at NBC and ran Sean Combs’s Bad Boy Films; and Peter Griffith, who founded a hip-hop Web portal and worked with Vibe Magazine.

NYT: The “Soul Train” brand has not entered the Internet age. Its website has barely been updated since 2006, when Cornelius stopped producing new episodes. For MadVision, the rights issues will be complicated. The company will have to compensate artists, producers and labels for rebroadcasts of the songs played on the show.