Fox Preparing to Unveil New Channel

When Rupert Murdoch reached out to recruit Nickelodeon executive Anne Sweeney to head up Fox’s new cable channel, he was high on enthusiasm but short on specifics. There were already dozens of cable networks serving niche audiences and it was hard to imagine anything new.

“Rupert felt the 18- to 49-year-old audience was underserved,” Sweeney says, explaining how Murdoch sketched out only a bare concept. “Frankly it struck me dumb for a moment.”

Apparently Sweeney quickly came around. On June 1, Fox will launch FX, its first foray into the highly competitive cable TV network business. The cornerstone of the new channel will be its seven hours a day of live programming, a mixture of seat-of-the-pants entertainment and reruns of campy old series like “Fantasy Island” and “The Green Hornet.”

FX is being billed as the first “general entertainment” cable channel to launch since the industry was in its infancy 15 years ago. Since then, cable networks have become increasingly narrow in their focus, appealing to slivers of the audience. Fox plans an opposite strategy.

“They are creating a concept more 1950s in style, with the faults but also the benefits of live TV,” says Robert Redella, vice president of programming at Cox Cable in Atlanta, one of the country’s largest cable operators. “That’s what’s lacking in today’s TV.”

Fox executives are cagey about how many subscribers FX will have at launch, but they promise it will be at least as many as the 17 million TNT had when it started in 1989, which was the biggest launch of a new network in cable history.

But with 78 different cable networks already in existence and another 75 on the drawing board in anticipation of the 500-channel universe, the TV dial is becoming dangerously overcrowded. Channel “surfing” is now the preferred viewing method for a whole generation.

Sweeney says Fox is acutely aware of that and therefore has developed a format for FX that is designed--in theory--to hold the viewer’s attention: “The premise about this network is reconnecting with the viewer, and the route to that is to get into the local community.”

Originating out of New York, FX will start with a live two-hour show titled “Breakfast Time,” and proceed through the day alternating between live programming and old network reruns, capping with a late-night talk show called “Back Chat.”

The live segments will include old chestnuts like “The Pet Show” and more novel ideas such as “Personal FX,” where families holding garage sales will be interviewed about what memories their belongings evoke--as well as a host taking calls from potential buyers.

FX will also dispatch a fleet of video vans around the country to visit communities for a week at a time, feeding back reports that will be integrated into various shows. The head of original programming at FX is Mark Sonnenberg, who previously was executive producer for the “KTLA Morning News,” the highly rated news show-cum-comedy troupe.

Despite the low-budget concept of many of the shows, Fox says it is spending $100 million in programming during the first year. Sweeney says between $10 million to $20 million has been allocated for promotion, with Fox-owned and affiliated TV stations as well as Murdoch-owned magazines like TV Guide and Mirabella expected to join the publicity bandwagon.

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Depending on advertising support and subscriber growth, Sweeney says FX will become profitable between its third and sixth years. In any case, when the costs of programming, promotion, marketing, overhead and satellite time are tallied, Fox will likely have invested several hundred million dollars. FX’s staff will total 120 employees by June 1.

That could represent a smaller risk than other cable TV network launches in the past. FX was born out of last year’s complicated cable TV regulations. Under the new law, TV stations were granted the right to negotiate payment for carriage from local cable systems.

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However, in lieu of cash payments, some stations sought a “second channel” on their local cable system to program themselves. Fox executives convinced their affiliates to give them their extra channel on the cable systems in exchange for sharing in FX’s revenues.

The result is what some critics have dubbed the “retransmission channel” after its origins in the heavily lobbied cable TV bill adopted by Congress last year.

In the past, cable TV networks started with an idea and then negotiated deals to be carried by local operators. In the case of FX, the anchor deal with cable giant Tele-Communications Inc. was made first and the idea for what the channel would be was hammered out later.

Even with Murdoch’s reputation and muscle behind it, committing valuable channel space to a new network, sight unseen, makes some operators understandably nervous. Indeed, with the so-called retransmission consent provisions in the new cable law, Cox’s Redella acknowledges it would have been difficult to launch FX. But, he notes, ABC did the same thing to launch ESPN-2 and NBC did it for its new cable network, America’s Talking.

“Fox had a window of opportunity and they took advantage of it,” Redella says.