The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 56

D-10 Sunday, March 29, 1998 1 nnter Life. PC Week and Interac ARMSTRONG from D-l tive Week. Also local: Ziff Foster City-based ZD Labs, which tests consumer electronics for the product reviews in Ziff magazines. Ziff only previous foray into TV, "The Site," a daily magazine format show about technology that it produced for MSNBC, was canceled when MSNBC went to 24-hour news last September. But Wangberg says Ziff is serious about booting up its own cable network and feels the computer market is big enough to get its own dedicated channel.

Some "107 million people in the country use computers at home or in the office," Wangberg says. "This is not a niche. We see this as something that's mainstream." ZDTV cooking up customized cable tice. ZDTV, owned by Ziff-Davis launches nationwide May 11 from San Francisco. New York-based Ziff-Davis, owned by Tokyo's Softbank is a major international publisher of computer magazines and operator of on-line services and high-tech trade shows, but the company is new to television.

Not so ZDTVs management team, however. Ziff hired Larry Wangberg, a former CEO of Times Mirror Cable Television, to be CEO of ZDTV. Wangberg hired Drebin and has signed Harry Fuller, former general manager of KPLXChannel 5 and ex-news director of KGOChannel 7, to be ZDTVs news director. on Bizcim mffl 1 1 i Big ambitions As this line-up of seasoned executives indicates, Ziff has big ambitions for ZDTV. Proclaims Wangberg: "This is to computing what CNN is to news, what ESPN is to sports." With six weeks till launch, 200 new staffers scurry about ZDTVs Townsend Street headquarters.

Simultaneously, workers hammer and saw in digitalized studios in a vintage brick building on York Street ZDTV plans to shoot 30 hours of original programming per week there. Wangberg says Ziff chose San Francisco as HQ for the channel because of its proximity to Silicon Valley and access to the content and design talent in Multimedia Gulch. Ziff also has a Bay Area pres IPO in offing Ziff is financing its expansion, at least in part, by floating an initial public offering, announced Feb. 18. Ziff officials said then that they hope to raise $460 million.

While Ziff won't confirm it officially, Bloomberg News reports that the IPO is planned for April. Citing IPO quiet period rules, Ziff execs won't say how much money they're spending on ZDTV, how many households they expect to reach initially or who all the major carriers will be. Ziff says it's "talking to" TCI the local cable provider, about carrying ZDTV in the San Francisco market. Ziff executives say the stock sale delayed ZDTVs launch, first announced for the end of the first quarter of 1998 essentially now but say the May 1 1 launch is firm. As it is, rival San Francisco online company CNET already produces two weekly hours of tech-related TV programming for the Sci-Fi Channel, the USA Network and KPLX.

But CNET's CEO Halsey Minor told the Wall Street Journal that CNET has abandoned plans for its own 24-hour TV tech channel, deciding that viewer and advertising interest wasn't there. That appears to be a matter of opinion. Larry Gerbrandt, a senior analyst with Paul Kagan Associates, a Carmel media research and consulting firm, says upscale, well-educated PC users present a desirable demographic for TV advertisers. And in niche-driven cable, Gerbrandt observes, "If you have See ARMSTRONG, D-ll ence with magazines such as Com- Each Way With Roundtrip Purchase From Oakland or San Jose to: From Monsanto shifts focus, selling optical unit DOW JONES NEWS SERVICE MINNEAPOLIS Monsanto Co. is selling its Orcolite optical products unit to BMC Industries Inc.

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