AT&T Broadband is pulling the plug July 31 on the San Francisco Bay Area's only local cable news service, BayTV, owned jointly by the MSO and NBC affiliate KRON-TV.

AT&T will replace BayTV on most of its systems with the Food Network, the cable channel most requested by local subscribers over the last 18 months, says the MSO's spokesman, Andrew Johnson. By August, 1.3 million households in the region will receive the Food Network, up from only 300,000 subscribers at present.

BayTV, which launched in July 1994, never seemed to find a clear identity. KRON president and general manager Dino Dinovitz says 44 full-time employees will be laid off in the move.

AT&T had invested millions of dollars in BayTV, says Johnson, but in the end decided it was simply uneconomical, especially compared to the potential of the Food Network.

The failure of BayTV was not a failure of local news channels in general, Johnson emphasizes. The Bay Area is culturally different from other locations, he says.

?In the Bay Area you have to do some pretty unique and special things to get the viewers' attention,? he says. ?You really have to knock their socks off because there are so many other activities to compete with TV. I think the channel tried a number of different formats, but they just couldn't break through.?

Dinovitz says KRON, which owned 51% of BayTV to AT&T's 49%, would like to have kept the station running, but the cable operator's decision to drop the channel made that impossible.

Ironically, the only cable show that may survive the shutdown and move over to KRON's broadcast operation is Bay Café ? a food show.

The demise of BayTV comes as KRON, sold last year to Young Broadcasting by the family that owns the San Francisco Chronicle, girds itself to lose its NBC affiliation to San Jose's Granite Broadcasting-owned KNTV on Jan. 1, 2002. AT&T, the dominant cable operator in the Bay Area, has agreed to carry KNTV on channel 3 in its systems.

AT&T's Johnson also says he is unaware of any plans for a successor to BayTV, and that no one has approached the MSO with any such plans.

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