(FORTUNE Magazine) – No one knows the danger of venturing into uncharted territory better than the 113-year-old National Geographic Society, which sent explorer Robert E. Peary to the North Pole and Hiram Bingham to excavate Machu Picchu. So when the society decided to start its own cable TV channel, it turned to Rupert Murdoch's Fox Entertainment Group to be its guide through the media jungle.

The partners launched the National Geographic Channel in early January. Luckily the nonprofit society's staff will program the network. (Fox, after all, is best known for nature programming like When Good Pets Go Bad.) The society also brings a film library with more than 2,000 hours of high-quality documentaries.

Fox, which owns two-thirds of the venture, will run the business side. Murdoch's operatives know how to deal with cable and satellite operators, which typically demand up-front payments in return for carriage. "Distribution is the key," says Laureen Ong, a former Fox executive who is president of the channel. Although the network is paying operators $2 to $5 a subscriber to carry the channel, it wasn't able to secure much carriage on jam-packed analog systems. It will reach just ten million homes, mostly through DirecTV; it has commitments that will take it to 28 million homes in four years.

The channel will probably need twice that many to break even, and it's going up against well-entrenched competitors like Discovery and Animal Planet. No wonder the society needed a protector: In cable, as in nature, only the strong survive.