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Eurosport to be replaced by CNBC.

TV5 to get morning hours back.

Cable News and Business Channel Europe (CNBC) and NTL have announced a major carrige deal for CNBC accross all NTL regions in the UK and Ireland. As well as carrige on Home Digital and Go Digital as at present, CNBC will be available 24 hours in all analogue regions. In the Republic of Ireland, this means that CNBC will replace Eurosport on analogue NTL cable and MMDS from Friday, Feburary 1st 2002 at 6am. Eurosport will remain available to Go Digital customers. Eurosport will continue to available to NTL Home Northern Ireland customers.

Announcing the launch, Mark Mohan, Marketing Director of NTL Ireland says: "As Ireland’s premier home entertainment provider, we regularly conduct research amongst our customers to track their interests and viewing preferences to ensure our channel line up satisfies demand. The introduction of CNBC Europe reflects the increasing appetite amongst our customers for fact-based content.As a customer-driven organisation we simply have to offer television programming which satisfies current viewing preferences. I know that CNBC Europe will quickly attract a dedicated following across our customer base and will enhance our basic channel line up. Irish consumers have demonstrated that they are strongly interested in news-type products and a real-time financial, business and personal investment news channel will help to supplement that demand.”

The move to drop Eurosport - rumoured as early as May 2001 - will come as a disappointment to many sports fans who do not subscribe to Sky Sports. Eurosport, owned by France's TF1 and part of the EBU, had access to many EBU sporting events including the Olympics, UEFA European Championship, and other less popular sports such as swimming, gymnastics, and motor racing. NTL's explaination that many people prefer news does not wash, as Sky News and TG4's Euronews relay as well as mainstream news services already provide a substantial news diet to NTL customers, while sports coverage continues to dwindle. However it appears NTL Ireland have had to go along with this NTL Group deal, and with the terrestrials and Sky channels untouchable, Nickelodeon and MTV extremly popular with vocal sections of NTL's market, and TV5 already having protested loudly at changes to its carrige arrangements, it looks like dropping Eurosport was the only option for NTL to carry out this deal. The major benificary of the deal is TV5 Europe, which after its recent mistreatment by NTL will now get its morning hours back and broadcast 24 hours.

CNBC Europe provides 24 hour coverage of the financial markets, focusing on the NYSE, NASDAQ, and FTSE, and will already be familar to NTL viewers from its former breakfast broadcasts on National Geographic. At weekends, it changes format to a general entertainment channel. Much of its weekend programmes will be familar to NTL viewers too, as they were mostly inherited from the former channel, NBC Super Channel, which was broadcast on Cablelink from 1986 (as Super) until its closure in 1998. These include golf coverage, chat shows The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Late Night with Conan O'Brien, documentary strand Dateline NBC, and drama Profiler. The NBC Network's nightly NBC News bulitten with Tom Brokaw is broadcast daily.

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