• by Paul Gough , May 7, 2004

Fox's long-awaited new entry into the ranks of cable channels will appear sometime this year.

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of Fox parent company News Corp., said Thursday that the new channel will debut by the end of 2004. But he declined to give many details about the type of channel or its distribution.

"We are looking at a number of genres--ones in which we have particular expertise that would be natural extensions of our Fox brand," Murdoch told analysts during a Thursday morning conference call.

The new channel could be a spinoff of the highly successful Fox News Channel, either a financial-news network that would compete with General Electric's CNBC and Time Warner's CNNfn, or even an entertainment channel along the lines of Comcast's E! Entertainment.

It's confirmation of an idea first floated last October by Fox Entertainment Group President-CEO Peter Chernin, who told analysts and investors at a financial conference that Fox was considering expanding the Fox News Channelfranchise. Chernin declined to say what genres Fox was interested in, but it's clear that business news could be a natural extension of the brand. Fox News Channel already carries extensive business coverage and could challenge CNNfn and CNBC.

Since its start in October 1996, Fox News Channel has grown to the point that it's been able to beat pioneer Cable News Network in viewership. It took only five years for Fox News Channel to bust what CNN had been working on since 1980, when Ted Turner invented the form. Fox's average viewership is 1.15 million, compared to CNN's 761,000 viewers and MSNBC's 373,000 viewers.

And that's not all. More Fox channels could be coming over the next few years. Murdoch confirmed those plans, but declined to be more specific Thursday.