Time Warner Cable Users to Get MSNBC

Time Warner Inc. has agreed to deliver the MSNBC news channel to millions more cable subscribers, apparently depriving Rupert Murdoch of a bigger send-off for his new Fox News Channel next month.

Fox executives felt they had an informal agreement that the service would be carried to millions of Time Warner subscribers. But those talks are said to have been suspended with no indication of when they may resume.

“It’s clearly disappointing for Fox,” said Chris Dixon, a media analyst for PaineWebber. “But this is by no means a body blow.”

The Fox News Channel is set to debut on Oct. 7 and is expected to be carried on cable systems reaching about 12 million subscribers, including some served by the nation’s biggest cable system operator, Tele-Communications Inc.

Time Warner would have given it subscribers on the nation’s second-biggest cable system, although Fox still would have been well behind CNN with 68 million subscribers. MSNBC has about 23 million subscribers.

Its initial distribution plan leaves it short of the 15 million to 20 million subscribers that a cable network must have before national advertisers get interested, said Dennis McAlpine, who follows the media industry at the investment firm Josephthal Lyon & Ross.

Fox executives are now looking for alternative ways to get the channel on television in key Time Warner markets like New York.

While it has run into problems at Time Warner, the nation’s No. 2 cable operation, Fox still will have a place on part of the system run by No. 1 TCI.

Time Warner has agreed to put MSNBC, a joint venture between NBC and Microsoft Corp., in half of the homes it serves by mid-1999, spokesman Michael Luftman said.