Sole Survivor

Turner wins a cable war

When Satellite NewsChannels went on the air in June 1982, officials of the cable-TV service predicted they would soon put Ted Turner's rival Cable News Network out of business. SNC's corporate parents, ABC and Westinghouse, boasted greater news-gathering assets than CNN and deeper pockets to offset losses. The stock market agreed: after SNC was an nounced, the over-the-counter price of a share of Turner Broadcasting System fell from $16 to $11.50 in two days. But last week David conquered Goliath with his checkbook. Turner bought out SNC for $25 million in order to shut it down on Oct. 27. Said his spokes man Arthur Sando: "The resources that were used to fight the competition can now strengthen CNN."

Turner's company will acquire almost none of SNC's assets except the key one: 7.5 million subscriber households, most of which will be added to the 22.6 million that receive CNN or the 5.3 million that get a sister cable service, CNN Head line News. To some financial analysts, the price seemed steep. Many of SNC's house holds are already reached by one or both of Turner's services. Moreover, SNC had lost an estimated $60 million in 1 6 months, had failed to match CNN's depth and variety, and might have folded within a year or two.

But other analysts predicted that the two CNN services would soon attract more advertising and charge cable operators a larger fee per subscriber. Said Bonnie Cook of a Nashville securities firm, Bradford & Co.: "Now Turner is the only game in town." Cook predicts that Turner's news services could rebound from combined losses of $15 million this year to a 1984 profit of $2 million or more as a result of the SNC deal.

SNC is the third network-linked cable service to collapse in little more than a year. The Entertainment Channel, which was financed in part by NBC's parent corporation, RCA, failed to attract subscribers. CBS Cable, a cultural channel, reached 5 million households but, like SNC, did not attract enough advertisers. Chairman Daniel Ritchie of Westinghouse Broad casting and Cable attributed SNC's woes to aggressive competition. Since SNC's debut, ABC, CBS and NBC have added a to tal of 33 hours a week of late-night and early-morning news shows. Thus, says Ritchie, "the availability of commercial time in broadcast news about doubled." His wry summation of SNC'S costly fling: "Our contribution has been to increase network news coverage." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.