Down to Business
Does Fox News finally have the needed carriage to debut its much talked about business channel? Time Warner Cable has promised to launch the net in all of its systems under a comprehensive deal reached over the weekend. The pact also features multi-year retrans extensions for all of the Fox owned & operated broadcast stations—a significant to-do crossed off the MSO’s list. Also included: multi-year extensions for Fox News and Speed and a pledge to soon roll out Fox Reality to all TW systems (some Fox Reality VOD rights are also part of the agreement). News Corp execs have said Fox Business Channel will not launch until it has sufficient coverage. It now has pacts with the 2 largest MSOs (Comcast inked a deal in Nov), and presumably, News Corp sibling DirecTV (which transfers to Liberty’s control in ’07) will also carry it.