Bbc Planning To Launch Cable Channel Just For U.S.

British Broadcasting Corp., widely recognized for the quality of its television programs and news reporting, will start up a commercially supported cable channel in the United States early next year to bring its dramas, comedies, documentaries and World News service directly into American homes for the first time.

The channel, to be called BBC America, is expected to be marketed to cable companies by Discovery Communications Inc. as part of a larger joint venture between the two companies.

BBC America will be financed by income from the joint venture, not by the license fees collected from television households that underwrite the broadcaster in Britain. But the channel will be wholly owned by the BBC and the programming will exclusively be its own.

Along with daily news broadcasts, which the BBC hopes will lead to its own all-news channel in the United States, BBC America will offer classic dramas of the type seen on PBS’s “Masterpiece Theater” as well as contemporary shows now seen on BBC1 and BBC2 in Britain. Among them would be dramas like “Ballykissangel” and so-called “Britcoms” like “Yes, Minister” and “Black Adder.”

In recent months, BBC executives in London have assured PBS that they intend to continue making co-productions with PBS stations.

The new BBC America channel will start out as part of a package of digitally delivered channels (transmitted by digital splitting of existing analog channels into subchannels), available in about 3 million homes served by TeleCommunications Inc. cable systems, which have been equipped with special boxes to receive hundreds of channels. TCI expects that number to reach between 9 and 10 million by late winter, a spokeswoman said Monday.

As part of the joint venture, Discovery’s sales force will also sell BBC America’s advertising.

A specific launch date has not been set, primarily because the overall joint venture agreement with Discovery has yet to be signed.

The channel is part of an ambitious new strategy by the BBC to expand its reach worldwide and to add substantial new commercial revenue to its public broadcasting coffers.

For now, though, the United States is the only place the BBC plans to start a BBC-owned entertainment channel with strictly its own programs.