Business Channel Marks Big-Time Cable Debut for NBC

At 6 a.m. (EDT) Monday, CNBC, the nation’s newest cable network and NBC’s biggest-ever push into cable, will start its 24-hour-a-day service with “World Business,” a lot of hope and only three well-known names.

CNBC--the initials stand for Consumer News and Business Channel--says it’s starting up with 13 million homes, or 26.3% of the nation’s cable-equipped homes, able to receive its programming. A rival claims the actual figure is only 6 million.

The “name” anchors it will have on launch day are a mixed lot: former CNN anchor Mary Alice Williams, who may not be permanent; conservative talk-show host John McLaughlin, and Dick Cavett, once of ABC, then PBS, and better known for his discussions of cultural creativity than of crass commerce.

Still, many industry eyes will be on the new venture, which reportedly is costing $65 million to start and is housed on two floors of a new, impersonal-looking grey office building in this busy New York City suburb.

Ted Turner, founding father of CNN, will be watching. So will executives of CBS and ABC. David Meister, president of the Financial News Network, will take particular interest in how his new competitor fares.

A neutral observer, Sander Vanocur, anchor of ABC’s Sunday “Business World,” feels that there is room in TV for another player in the fields of high finance, business news and consumer news.

“I think that business is the best story around now,” he says. “It’s better than politics--because business, financial and technological decisions always seem to move ahead of government’s ability to deal with them.”

But Vanocur may be in the minority in feeling there is room for another business-news venture. Something may have to give.

Consider. New York-based FNN, begun in 1981, says it serves 32 million U.S. and Canadian homes. CNBC says it needs 30 million homes to break even.

Is a turf tiff imminent? Is the nation in for the cable equivalent of the gunfight at the OK Corral?

“I don’t know if it’s as much that as it is walking down a deserted street late at night with your hands in your pockets, wondering about sounds and shadows and noises in the dark,” says the feisty Meister.

“We don’t know what they really are,” adds FNN’s chief, saying he’s not certain that CNBC will be only a financial and consumer news channel. He also asserts that it will have 6 million homes on debut day.

There is muttering from the Turner camp, too, that CNBC is but a ploy to lay the groundwork for a general-news channel battling Turner’s successful Cable News Network.

Such talk nettles CNBC president Michael L. Eskridge, whose NBC-managed company is to be owned 50-50 by NBC and Cablevision Systems Corp. when an agreement reached last year becomes final.

Sitting in his office, his cowboy boots propped on his desk, Eskridge flatly denies that CNBC is headed the way of a CNN.

“No, absolutely not. Consumer news and business news are what we started out to do, and that’s what we’re doing,” he says.

Furthermore, he says, CNBC’s contract with its cable affiliates “precludes our doing general news.”

But comparisons with Turner’s 24-hour news service are inevitable, although CNN only had access to 1.7 million homes when it began in 1981.

Back then, CNN had a staff of about 300--now up to around 1,600 world-wide. CNBC also is starting small, with a staff of 275--200 of whom will be based in Ft. Lee. Fifty are anchors and reporters providing 17 hours of live and taped first-run material each weekday, with seven hours of repeat material aired after that.

CNN took five years and $77 million in red ink before turning a profit in 1985. Eskridge projects that CNBC will be in the red--he won’t say how much--for three years before turning profitable in the fourth year.

Also like CNN, CNBC is non-union, which keeps costs and salaries of its on-air and production staff well below those of the networks.

Even more important, say officials of each company, being non-union allows for far greater flexibility than is possible under union contracts at the three major networks, including NBC.

“We’ve got a lot of young, aggressive people here who have a little bit of training in a few fields, and a couple of senior people who will help finish the training job,” Eskridge says.

“And those people will operate a camera one day, run a Chyron (character generator) the next day, sweep up the studio the third, then carry furniture around, write copy, do all this stuff that you just can’t do” under rigid network-style union rules, he says.

This ability to have jack-of-all-trades employees “is great from their point of view, and great from ours. . . . We can afford to survive.”

For the predominantly young staff, it’s a way to break into the major leagues. But it’s likely, once CNBC gets going, that they’ll be hearing from organizers from technical unions and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. The latter represents on-air anchors and correspondents at the major networks, as well as entertainers.

When NBC originally announced plans for its cable venture, they included a weekend sports package. But that idea was quietly dropped early this year. Eskridge, who was executive producer of NBC’s Summer Olympics telecasts last fall, frankly admits that it “never made a great deal of sense to me.”

There already is a lot of weekend sports on cable and the networks, and CNBC wasn’t going to able to afford “anything that was substantially different, yet it was going to cost us a significant amount of money for rights,” he explains.

As it turned out, cable operators felt the same way, he says. Now, Eskridge says, he’ll use weekends for counter-programming against sports and trying new projects.

The start of CNBC’s day may prove a tad early for West Coast viewers. Sign-on will be 3 a.m. PDT, because all CNBC shows will air nationally at the same time.

A CNBC spokesman said the service will be available in the Los Angeles city area on United Cable and West Valley Cable. Elsewhere in Southern California, it will be on cable systems serving Ventura, Alhambra, Pasadena, Riverside, Santa Ana, Fullerton and Seal Beach. In San Diego, CNBC said, the service will be carried by Cox Cable and Americable.

CNBC’s weekday schedule so far has “World Business” starting the day, then “CNBC Morning,” then the constantly updated, 8 1/2-hour “Money Wheel” of financial, market and business news segments, starting at 5:30 a.m. (PDT).

That’s followed at 2 p.m. (PDT) by “Smart Money,” a consumer show with a studio audience.

Then comes “Media Beat,” a half-hour report on media business that initially will be hosted by Mary Alice Williams, who last month joined NBC News after eight years at CNN. How long she’ll remain isn’t certain. Her main duties lie at NBC News in Manhattan, where she’s substitute-anchoring regular network newscasts and planning to co-anchor a new prime-time news series.

Her CNBC work “depends on how her schedule shapes up with her network obligations,” Eskridge says. She’ll probably do her CNBC turn “until it becomes logistically difficult.”

Following “Media Beat” will be “Business View,” a one-hour wrap-up of the day’s hot business news, then “The Dick Cavett Show” at 4:30 p.m. (PDT), in which he’ll interview guests on consumer, business and life-style issues in front of a studio audience.

Then comes “CNBC Live,” described as a two-hour information show with a format akin to that a network morning program. That will be followed by “McLaughlin,” another studio-audience show with the host interviewing people from business, politics, law, medicine, media and other fields.

After that, everything except “Money Wheel” is repeated until 3 a.m. (PDT) the next morning.

CNBC’s 24-hour service continues on weekends, under the umbrella title of “CNBC Weekend.” But it only will have three to 3 1/2 hours each day of first-run material, including a Sunday childrens’ program called “Kids Are Consumers, Too.” Other special weekend segments will cover real estate, the business of sports, workplace conditions, a women-at-work segment, and a “consumer speak-out” segment, a spokesman says.