Al Jazeera English vs. The Charlie Sheen Channel

Marty Kaplan
HuffPost

"This is strictly a business decision," a Comcast source told Rupert Murdoch's Web site MarketWatch about whether Comcast, the biggest cable operator in the U.S., will offer Al Jazeera English to its 24 million subscribers.

Not a decision about whether Al Jazeera English is anti-American, anti-Israeli, a tool of Al Qaeda, a propagandist for Palestinians. Or none of the above. Nope -- it's strictly dollars and cents.

Comcast has limited bandwidth. With room for only so many new channels, every one of them has to maximize viewership. Al Jazeera English, which is running a "Demand Al Jazeera in the USA" campaign on its Web site, told Comcast that in the first couple of days of Egypt's uprising, nearly half of their 10 million minutes of live-streamed coverage was being watched in the U.S. But Comcast isn't yet convinced; they're worried that the audience for an Al Jazeera English cable channel would just be "news junkies and people who happen to be particularly interested in the Middle East for the moment and will tune out as soon as news out of the region slows down."

So for Comcast, which just completed its purchase of NBC Universal, it comes down to whether carrying Al Jazeera English is a better business bet than carrying The Vampire Network or Showtime Abs 'n' Buns.

(Original here.)