The new NBC Sky World News will make its debut this summer, it has been confirmed.
In a challenge to the international dominance of CNN, the jointly branded channel will combine the resources of Comcast’s NBC News with those of its recent acquisition Sky News.
Interviewed by the Financial Times, NBC’s Andy Lack said NBC Sky World News would ultimately hire 100 to 200 dedicated staff. There would also be 10 new bureaus around the globe that would expand the NBC-Sky reporting footprint by some 50 per cent. With guaranteed distribution on Comcast and Sky, the channel would reach 130 million households at launch.
“We’ve longed for an international channel,” Lack told the FT. “Going back to the Gulf war when CNN essentially came on to the scene, we knew then at NBC that if you weren’t in the 24-hour news business globally, you weren’t really in the news business. So when I first went to NBC in 1993 it was like, goddamn, how do we get one of those?”
It’s not as if NBC is short of news channels. Domestically it runs MSNBC and recently launched the streamed NBC News Now, there’s also CNBC around the globe and a 25% interest in Euronews.
