Media magnate Rupert Murdoch plans to take on CNBC, launching a competing business news channel by the end of the year, he said in a magazine interview.
"We're in pretty intense discussions with the biggest cable companies, and making quite considerable progress," the News Corp. chairman told Newsweek for the magazine's Feb. 13 issue. (MSNBC is a Microsoft-NBC joint venture.)
After spending more than $1.5 billion on Internet ventures in the last year, Murdoch said he is on the verge of announcing plans to offer broadband through his satellite-television service DirecTV. That project, along with News Corp.'s current Internet holdings, will bring in "a conservative $1 billion" in revenue by 2010, he predicted.
Murdoch also responded to concerns that young members of MySpace.com, one of his recent acquisitions, are being targeted by sexual predators. A third of the company's staff monitors the site to keep it clean, he said.
"We're being very proactive," he said. "We plan to reach out further to school principals, church groups and community organizations to educate them on the safety measures we've developed."
The site soon will allow visitors to exchange and post video, he said.
