• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, November 7, 2006

Strangely, Comcast Corp. has agreed to carry the new business news cable channel from Fox, even though Fox hasn't definitely decided to develop one. News of the Comcast deal was broken in today's New York Times.

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch has all but given the go-ahead for a Fox Business News channel, which would compete with the likes of CNBC. The business channel would be a spinoff of the Fox News channel.

Still, it would be weird for a cable operator to tip its negotiating hand for taking on a new channel, when in theory that channel isn't even ready to go.  Stranger still is that Comcast, the biggest cable operator in the land, has to renew its Fox News deal.

Naturally, it would be in News Corp.'s best interest to leverage its popular Fox News channel to get on another cable channel. Media companies have been doing this with cable operators for over two decades now--some with success, and sometimes with massive disagreements that temporarily meant channels going off the air.

Comcast Corp. would be in a better negotiating position to handle one deal at a time--isolating the new channel to determine its own benefits and performance.

In Comcast's--and other MSOs'--favor, the new channel would probably be put on its digital tier, which goes to fewer of its cable subscribers than analog tiers do. Digital-tier deals have been typically easy to get, according to cable executives.

Working in News Corp.'s favor is that with the Comcast digital tier and News Corp.'s own DirecTV, the new channel would have distribution to the tune of some 27 million subscribers, a healthy launch for a new network.

Business cable news is one of the few areas where there is no competition to NBC Universal's CNBC--perhaps for good reason. Time Warner tried to make a go of it with CNNfn, a spinoff of CNN,  that was killed in 2004.

Comcast would do well to consider that in its business dealings for another business channel.