News Corp said net income for the third quarter was $400m (£210m) compared with $434m a year ago in the same period.
The media giant was hit by a 15% drop in TV operating income to $221m, due to higher programming costs at the Fox Network from the Super Bowl.
News Corp chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch also blamed the US ad market for the drop.
"The television segment was down year on year, reflecting higher programming costs and the soft advertising marketplace in the US," he said.
Although overall operating income rose by 9% to $889m, the bottom-line shortfall resulted from a $77m loss from the restructuring of a cable sports network Fox Sports Net, jointly owned with Cablevision Systems Corp.
However, profits at News Corp were lifted by strong DVD releases such as 'Alien vs Predator' and 'I, Robot', which pushed the filmed entertainment sector up 15% to $251m from last year's third quarter figure of $218m.
The third-quarter results to March 31 revealed good performances from its cable networks business with revenue up to $633m from $580m. Operating income also rose 55% due to higher audiences at Fox News and FX.
Italian satellite-TV service Sky Italia saw losses of $21m, an improvement on the $105m loss reported in the second quarter. It managed to take its subscriber base to 3.2m from 3.1 in the previous quarter. News Corp said the division is expected to turn its first profit in the fourth quarter.
Meanwhile, pay-TV service BSkyB announced yesterday it had added 95,000 new subscribers in the UK to reach 7.7m households, at the top end analysts' forecasts, and is set to its target of 8m homes by the end of 2005.
Murdoch added: "Our third-quarter results were led by the strong performances of our filmed entertainment and cable network programming segments and was achieved despite a weaker performance at television."
News Corp owns newspapers including The New York Post, The Australian, The Times, Sunday Times, The Sun and the News of the World.
Other holdings include publisher Harper Collins and broadcasting companies BSkyB, Fox News, Fox TV, Fox Sports, Sky Italia, DirecTV, men's channel FX, and Asian satellite network Star TV.
If you have an opinion on this or any other issue raised on Brand Republic join the debate in the .
.jpg)
.jpg)