Fox Business Network (FBN) will launch on October 15, announced Neil Cavuto, FOX News Senior Vice President and Managing Editor of Business News. FBN currently has 30 million subscribers under contract after securing distribution agreements with major cable operators in top markets around the country, including the world's financial capital–NYC–where it will be seen on expanded basic cable.
HQ'd in News Corp.'s street level studios in midtown Manhattan, FBN has also established bureaus in such key markets as Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco (Silicon Valley), Washington, D.C. and London.
In making the announcement, Cavuto said, "I'm extremely excited to be part of such a dynamic venture and I look forward to building on the success of our existing top five business programs in cable news."
Fox News EVP Kevin Magee will be responsible for the channel's day to day ops, while Cavuto will direct content and business news coverage and serve in an on-air capacity. Cavuto will report to Magee and Roger Ailes, Chairman & CEO, Fox News and Chairman of Fox Television Stations, who will oversee FBN.
It will be interesting to see how the network plans to position itself against CNBC, Bloomberg and MSNBC. The business TV network marketplace is pretty saturated.
Perhaps the Fox News and Cavuto names will make it easy to break through. Cavuto told TVBR in a recent interview: "I think business programming, by and large, has always been focused as if you were a broker. Well the 70% of Americans who are directly or indirectly investing in the market, they're not all brokers and yet I think programming has been geared to them as if they were…I'm a very big believer that business news has been horribly misrepresented to the public as being dull. Now I might not strike you as the most riveting guy, but I believe that it's riveting stuff. I think it's been poorly positioned in the marketplace and relegated to, like I say, in the business pages of the newspapers or business magazines and people summarily look at that and say well then it's not for me. I always like to tell people almost anything going on in the world has an angle on business and money that you might not appreciate or you might not see. I make it my mission, FOX makes it its mission, to show you that and when you do that and help people see things in a somewhat different context, I think you are giving them a much broader and more appealing view of business than has traditionally been the case."
