well, we ll find out. so michael calderone and edward f echt lsenthal, thank you so much for joining us. so what do you think about al jazeera starting an american network? tweet your comments to me @joannelipman. i m be chatting after the show. up next, u.s. s overhaul one year later. is it working?
so moving on here, edward, let me start with you. there s so much competition now in cable news, including planned or already on the air networks from china, russia, univision with abc, fox just started a sports network. is there room for another news network? i think it s a great time to launch. just this week vice, which used to be a canadian music magazine was valued somewhere close to the valuation of the new york times courts the business sites, its u.s. traffic this week passed that of the economists in the u.s. at time where i work we just launched an interactive film unit. there s so much ferment and excitement and so to see it s all in the execution. they say that there s a 55 million strong untapped audience. do you think all those people really want more news? the cable news universe is still pretty small compared to the general television.
before we go, i m going to ask both of you. edward, handicap their chances of success. well, as i said before, i think one big question is how well they do. is there a history of this kind of thing working before? you look at what the uae did with its newspaper there and there s losses that have mounted. the funders have pulled back. so to some degree i think we have to wait and see what the programming is. but they will eventually even they will have pressures. michael? you know, i mean right now they re in about 45 to 50 million homes. it will be interesting to see what sort of deals they re able to keep with cable providers. the only one they have had real trouble with is time warner. time warner says they re still in negotiations so maybe the reception could impact whether they get on time warner cable, which is in more u.s. homes, or depending on the ratings just how they keep these homes.