CNN has announced that it plans to close down its financial news channel, CNNfn.

The channel was launched in 1995 as a competitor to CNBC and Bloomberg Television. However, while CNBC enjoys widespread distribution on cable and satellite, CNNfn is only available to around 30 million out of 110 million US TV households. The distribution issue was compounded when the dot-com "bubble" burst at the turn of the century and interest in financial news programming plummeted. Even CNBC's ratings have yet to really recover.

"We came to the conclusion that we would have more potential for growth going in a different way," said CNN News Group president Jim Walton.

To that end, CNN confirmed plans to revamp CNN Headline News in primetime, creating around one hundred jobs. Some existing CNNfn programmes will move to CNN, including Dolans Unscripted and Open House.

CNN also says that it plans to offer cable operators CNN International to replace CNNfn on their lineups.