WASHINGTON: Time Warner Cable (TWC) will carry Al Jazeera America, which it had dropped earlier this year, giving the cable news channel a bigger foothold in the US.
The channel, owned by Qatar-based Al Jazeera and launched in August, will be available on digital basic cable packages in New York, Los Angeles and Dallas in the next six months, TWC said in a statement yesterday.
The company said it would add the channel on all of its systems in the coming months. It is second-largest US cable provider, with 12 million subscribers. TWC declined to comment on the terms of the deal. A spokeswoman for Al Jazeera did not respond to a request for comment.
Last January, TWC had dropped the channel just hours after Al Jazeera announced it was buying Current TV, a struggling cable channel founded by Al Gore. Bright House Networks, a smaller cable system TWC negotiates programming contracts for, will also carry the new channel.
In a statement, Al Jazeera America interim Chief Executive Officer Ehab Al Shihabi said the channel would now be available in 55m homes. It will still trail the reach of CNN since the latter is available in about 100 million homes. Comcast Corp, the largest US cable operator, carries the network, as does DirecTV, Dish Network Corp and Verizon Communications Inc’s FiOS.
Globally, Al Jazeera is seen in more than 260m homes in 130 countries.
Reuters
