SATELLITE & CABLE: CNBC beefs up live coverage across Asian financial hubs

CNBC Asia will air 20 hours more of live programming from the end of this month, in response to a global demand for more business and financial news from Asia. Executives at CNBC Asia said the changes were made to strengthen its positioning as a business and financial news channel, differentiate itself from the other 'news' channels, and attract more viewers and advertisers. "From our research and individual comments gathered from Europe, USA and Asia, viewers want more coverage of the Asian markets," said Scott Goodfellow, acting president for CNBC Asia. "People usually group CNBC, CNN, BBC and Channel NewsAsia together as news channels, and compare us to (the other channels), but we do not view ourselves as a news channel. "There are people who tune in not looking for any big news but to pick up little things - news items that their business is associated with and that can influence their business decisions. These people are a big category," he explained. To tap in on this category of viewers, CNBC will deliver more live reports from regional exchanges, in-depth analyses and live interviews, increasing the hours of many of its benchmark programmes, such as PowerLunch, Squawk Box and Market Watch, to a weekly total of 50 hours in live coverage. A new programme called New Company - a showcase of how brick and mortar companies adapt to the digital business environment - will also be launched. Chris Blackman, vice president of news programming, said CNBC Asia intends to be "the most important channel bar none for those needing business development news, and we make it available to them whenever they need and want it." Over the past 12 months, CNBC has been trying to position itself as a channel in its own category. Last year, the channel began focusing on producing and airing local channels through joint-ventures in several markets, with Nikkei-CNBC and CNBC India now reaching the most number of viewers in the region, and CNBC Australia becoming increasingly important as a source of locally-produced programmes for the rest of Asia. Mr Blackman said that it also wanted to inject more spontaneity and excitement in programmes, but maintained that CNBC is not abandoning the coverage of 'news' events. "For any news story that has a breaking impact, we report how it relates to the impact on markets," he said, adding that the message they want to convey to those demanding business news is "this is real-time news as they break on air". A series of 30-second TVCs will air on CNBC and other channels - Discovery, AXN, MTV and Hallmark - and print ads have started running in global and regional business and financial magazines. According to Mark Froude, VP and director of international sales, the network has seen major business growth in recent years; advertising revenue is up 80 per cent and clients have doubled, while revenues have tripled since the Asian monetary crisis. Mr Froude said CNBC Asia would focus on financial and business clients for the next 12 months, although "it is clear to us that the key aspect in advertising development are new economy type clients". CNBC Asia derives 80 per cent of its revenues from advertisers, which include Nokia, Credit Suisse, Singapore Airlines and Allianze AG.

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