Media

Comcast shelves plan to take on CNN with new international channel


Comcast is proposing to shelve ambitious plans for a new international news channel to rival CNN, after coronavirus blew apart the financial case for uniting its NBC and Sky brands for the first time.

Executives on Wednesday told staff hired for NBC Sky World News that its US parent company could no longer support the London-based project because its business model had become unviable, according to people familiar with the situation.

Even before the pandemic erupted, the new channel was a risky bet in a profit-thin global news landscape that has been dominated by CNN for more than three decades.

The planned summer launch, which was “paused” in April, was Comcast’s first big attempt to bring together its transatlantic news divisions since its $30bn acquisition of UK-based Sky in 2018.

A proposal to shelve the news channel will now go to consultation with staff, who have been told that they will be able to suggest alternative options, the people said. More than 50 staff had been hired to date.

NBC News declined to comment.

The move is a further blow to NBC’s long-held aspiration to secure international recognition for it US news brands.

As well as scaling back its ambitions, Comcast has been forced to slash costs to cope with production shutdowns and a slump in advertising, which has fallen by more than a quarter across its channels. This week NBCUniversal started to cut hundreds of jobs across its US operations.

Before the pandemic struck, NBC and Sky had been in the early stages of hiring 100-200 dedicated staff for the project, and opening 10 new bureaus worldwide. The service also planned to tap the combined 3,500 workforce of Sky News and NBC News.

The NBC Sky World News plan was led by Deborah Turness, the British TV executive who ran NBC news from 2013 to 2017. It was also backed by Andy Lack, former chairman of NBC News, who left the company in May.

“We’ve longed for an international channel,” Mr Lack told the Financial Times in January. “Going back to the Gulf war when CNN essentially came on to the scene, we knew then at NBC that if you weren’t in the 24-hour news business globally, you weren’t really in the news business. So when I first went to NBC in 1993 it was like, goddamn, how do we get one of those?”



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