Extended cable

Despite 15 years of steady expansion, New England Cable News could never make a deal with Rhode Island's cable carrier, leaving NECN one state shy of reaching all of New England.

But now NECN has found another way into Rhode Island: the FIOS fiber - optic system of Verizon Corp. The company will carry NECN when it launches its Rhode Island television service in a few weeks, allowing the 24-hour news channel to at last claim audiences throughout the region.

"Rhode Island has been our Mount Everest, the last mountain for NECN to climb in New England," said Philip S. Balboni, NECN's founder and president. "It's taken 15 years to get there, but it is all the sweeter for the wait."

NECN's entry into the Rhode Island market is another example of technology reshaping the television industry by providing more choices and opportunities. It's part of NECN's strategy to expand its audience beyond cable -- through other carriers such as phone companies and satellite services. The combination of new competitors and expanding channel capacity is creating a hunger for program ming that could mean additional outlets, leverage, and money for regional players like NECN, analysts said.

It's supply and demand, according to Paul Niwa, a journalism professor at Emerson College. Fiber networks, such as Verizon's, have the potential capacity, or bandwidth, to carry thousands of channels, Niwa said. Cable companies, in response, are expanding the capacity of their systems, too.

The result: Both will need programming and lots of it. Over the long term, said Niwa, the need to fill bandwidth may not only carry regional channels into new local markets, but also national ones. The potential audience: transplants interested in news from home.

"NECN is coming into the FIOS deal at the best possible moment," Niwa said. "Verizon is hungry for programming and going to be deploying fiber-to-the-home all over the country."

Certainly, Balboni said, NECN could attract audiences beyond New England. Just look at Red Sox fans appearing in ballparks across the nation whenever the team plays on the road.

For the time being, though, NECN is focused on expanding its New England audience. The channel also is negotiating with satellite services, EchoStar Communications Corp., and DIRECTV Group Inc. to distribute NECN to some 750,000 New England homes.

Balboni said he hopes to get a deal by fall. An EchoStar spokesman declined to comment. Robert Mercer, a DIRECTV spokesman, said, "We've spoken with NECN and currently have no plans to launch the channel."

Finding ways to reach more homes is important to NECN because advertising rates are based on audience size. More viewers means more money.

Cable channels also make money by charging fees to cable systems and other carriers. NECN now reaches nearly 4 million homes in New England, with about 670,000 households in the Boston market viewing the channel at least once a week, according to Nielsen Media Research, the ratings firm. That compares with Boston viewership of 465,000 households for Fox News and 401,000 for CNN.

Comcast Corp. and media company Hearst Corp. own NECN. The cable channel is a private company so it doesn't report revenues or disclose fees.

In Rhode Island, said Balboni, NECN hopes to build an audience through FIOS. He added the channel would be open to being carried by Cox Communications Inc., which has the cable franchise in Rhode Island. A Cox spokeswoman, Leigh Ann Woisard, said Cox already offers local news and sports channels and views NECN's fees as too costly.

"We don't find our customers clamoring for it," she said.

Simon Applebaum, contributing editor at Cable World, a trade magazine, said it won't be easy for NECN. Verizon has to build its Rhode Island audience from scratch.

So far, Verizon has won state approval to offer TV services to 80,000 households in and around Warwick, R.I. It is seeking approval to extend service to nearly 160,000. Rhode Island has about 400,000 households.

"It really could take them awhile," Applebaum said. "NECN might have to do marketing on its own end just to say, 'Hey, we're available.' "

If anything, NECN knows patience. Launched in 1992, NECN built its audience one cable system at a time. Many operators were skeptical that round-the-clock regional news would attract audiences or that NECN was worth the fees it wanted.

It took six years for the channel to become profitable, according to Balboni. Today, NECN is the largest of the nation's 30 or so regional news channels.

Jim Thistle, a broadcast journalism professor at Boston University, said NECN succeeded through smart financial management and a commitment to serious journalism. Still, NECN's ratings today are a fraction of the newscasts of network affiliates, meaning less revenue.

NECN's signature 9 p.m. news, for example, attracts 24,000 viewers. In comparison, 240,000 viewers watch the 10 p.m. news of Fox affiliate WFXT, Channel 25, according to Nielsen.

But NECN, a non union shop, starts with lower costs. In addition, the station is also willing to live with profit margins about one-third of network affiliates' and devote a greater share of revenues to the news. As a result, Thistle said, NECN gives in-depth coverage to local issues that network affiliates, in search of ratings, have all but abandoned.

"They figured out how to make serious news survivable," said Thistle. "They became healthy. They became profitable. But they don't mess with the news."

Robert Gavin can be reached at rgavin@globe.com.