NEW YORK (AFP) — News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch is opening a new front in his drive for media supremacy with a launch set for Monday of his Fox Business Network in the US market.
The new business news channel takes square aim at market leader CNBC, part of the General Electric Co., in th effort to capture American cable and satellite subscribers seeking financial news.
The move by the 76-year-old media mogul and chairman of News Corp., who in August toasted a 5.6-billion-dollar takeover of Dow Jones & Co., and The Wall Street Journal, is the latest effort to expand his global media empire.
Murdoch and top News Corp. executives are keeping fairly tight-lipped about what Fox Business Network will look like, but the channel's website offers a few clues about its format.
Fox has lined up seasoned presenters -- including a former CNBC correspondent -- to front its new channel which promises to take a "simple approach" to covering business news for "Main Street."
Top CNBC executives are likely to be watching their backs, however, as Murdoch's Fox News Channel has succeeded in snaring viewers and displacing CNN's former monopoly on general news and politics.
"It's going to be very different," Murdoch told analysts recently.
"We're for people on Main Street. We're looking for different things, a different initiative, a different look, you'll see an exciting channel starting," the News Corp. chief promised.
Without mentioning CNBC, Murdoch said the Fox Business Network would aim to focus on telling success stories rather than dwelling on "failures and scandals and politics."
The Fox channel will initially be available in 34 million American homes. CNBC can be accessed in 90 million homes while rival Bloomberg TV is available in 49 million homes.
In August, CNBC had an average audience of around 87,000 people in the key market segment of viewers aged between 25 and 54, according to Nielsen media research.
Murdoch's ambitions for Fox Business Network are likely to be buoyed by the success of some of News Corp.'s other television assets.
The media group is a major player in satellite-broadcasting in Europe, including BSkyB in Britain and Sky Italia in Italy, and also runs the Star network in Asia.
Many of CNBC's viewers are Wall Street executives and financial professionals, and advertisers are prepared to pay handsomely to reach such an affluent market.
Fox Business Network's launch, which was announced in February, is being overseen by Roger Ailes, a senior News Corp. executive and one time adviser to US president Richard Nixon.
Ailes told the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in an interview published Monday that he never tries to predict Murdoch's business moves when asked if the media tycoon would try to find a way around the content-sharing deal between CNBC and the WSJ.
CNBC shows regularly tout interviews with leading journalists from America's biggest-selling business newspaper. The channel's content-sharing deal with the WSJ runs through 2012, but some analysts wonder if Murdoch will seek to overturn the agreement.
Although the Murdoch business channel is aimed at a niche market, many Americans, who are not wealthy individuals, own and trade stocks and Murdoch is also chasing these potential viewers.
Despite a differing identity, both channels nonetheless will be rivals and likely pursuing the same advertisers.
CNBC reaped advertising revenues of 245 million dollars in 2006 and made an operating profit of 335 million dollars, according to the SNL Kagan research firm.
