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Bloomberg makes changes as the competition hots up

For 13 years, Bloomberg Television has happily remained something of a secret.

The network serves as the public face of the financial information powerhouse Bloomberg LP, delivering no-nonsense business news and analysis to industry professionals and encouraging the sales of the company's core product, the Bloomberg terminal.

But within the television industry, Bloomberg TV is largely an afterthought in a lucrative genre dominated by CNBC.

That could be changing as the marketplace for television business news heats up. Next month, News Corp is scheduled to introduce the Fox Business Network, attracting new attention to the financial television news niche and setting up a showdown with CNBC.

Executives say the timing is coincidental, but Bloomberg TV has been making changes of its own. The most significant will happen early next month, when Bloomberg TV does away with the trademark crawl along the bottom of its screen in favor of a cleaner look that puts the stories into context. And the company is making progress in finding potential viewers -- recent deals with Comcast have brought the channel to important financial locations, including New Jersey, South Florida and Washington.

News Corp has not divulged its plans for Fox Business Network yet (both News Corp and NBC Universal, the parent company of CNBC, declined to comment), but some analysts expect it will seek a broad investing audience. Publicly, Bloomberg executives say they are staying out of the fight between CNBC and Fox, but they also hope Fox and CNBC will compete for the same viewers, leaving it to serve financial professionals.

"We think it's too difficult to try to be something beyond a news organization," the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, Matt Winkler, said. "Clearly, there is a part of CNBC that is focused on entertainment. That's not our focus."

In the best of bull markets, audience numbers for financial news are tiny. Last month, CNBC's business day averaged 87,000 viewers aged 25 to 54, its best August in five years. CNBC is also found on a lot of trading floors, and Bloomberg TV can be found on the Bloomberg terminals, in addition to its own cable channel.

So instead of sheer numbers, the networks fight over demographics, and here Bloomberg has an advantage. The Mendelsohn Affluent Survey has found that Bloomberg TV viewers have an average household income of US$199,000, the highest of any cable network it measures. CNBC viewers have an average household income of US$184,000.

Brian Sullivan, host of the noon to 2pm program In Focus on Bloomberg TV, said he prefers influence over reach.

"I'd take a smaller, more elite audience anyway, because then I don't have to have game shows," he said, taking an unveiled shot at Fast Money MBA Challenge, the CNBC game show that started last month.

Unlike CNBC, Bloomberg TV does not subscribe to Nielsen ratings, so it is difficult to estimate how many televisions are tuned to the channel on a given day, but the number is assumed to be low. (Overall, Bloomberg has a potential cable reach of 49 million homes in the US, less than CNBC's 90 million but more than Fox Business Network's anticipated 31 million. Bloomberg has an additional 150 million potential international viewers and broadcasts in seven languages.)

Bloomberg does not break out its TV division revenue. During a given hour, CNBC broadcasts almost twice as many commercials as Bloomberg TV.

"Television helps build our brand around the world. It gives us access to the kind of people who make news. And we think it helps us sell the other Bloomberg product offerings," Bloomberg chairman Peter Grauer said.

Bloomberg TV recently lured the husband-and-wife team of Al Hunt and Judy Woodruff to its Washington bureau.

Woodruff, a longtime CNN anchor, interviews guests for a monthly program. Hunt, a former reporter at the Wall Street Journal, oversees news coverage in the nation's capital. At the Journal, Hunt said, he spent 99 percent of his time creating newspaper content. At Bloomberg, his bureau feeds the terminal, TV, radio, Web site and wire service.

"Other places talk about multimedia, but I don't know if anybody is as genuinely multimedia as we are," he said.
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