Word: cbs
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Winning might not be much better. Although the entertainment business often makes deals that seem right out of Fantasyland, the money that ABC, CBS and Fox are paying demonstrates just how desperate the network-television business has become. CBS paid $4 billion to get back in the game, intercepting rights to the American Football Conference previously held by NBC. A day later ABC, the No. 3 network, outbid NBC with a $4.4 billion deal to retain Monday Night Football. Its cable unit, ESPN (which shared Sunday-night games with Turner Broadcasting's TNT for eight years), dropped $4.8 billion...
...networks essentially paid double the previous contract for programming that is steadily losing viewership. NFL ratings have tumbled about 33% since their peak in the early 1980s. And overall network viewership continues to dwindle: the prime-time ratings on ABC, CBS and NBC have fallen 47% over the same period. "What this shows you is that it's not football that is the draw," says Porter Bibb, a media analyst with Ladenburg, Thalmann & Co., "but that the networks are struggling for survival...
...sent to the bench as a result of CBS's acquisition of its AFC rights, had to resort to claiming rational behavior to explain coming up empty-handed. Executives at the unit of giant General Electric called the contract bids "reckless," saying it wasn't worth more than $340 million a year to keep the AFC rights, the weakest in the package, or more than $500 million a year to obtain Monday Night, considered the strongest. "There was no chance of making money in this deal," said Dick Ebersol, president of NBC Sports, after the announcements. "I'll guess...
...foundation for establishing entire television (Fox) and satellite (British Sky Broadcasting) networks. From this perspective, it makes sense to pay more for the NFL than you can get back in advertising revenues. Murdoch fired that thunderbolt in 1994, paying $1.58 billion for the NFC package, 49% more than CBS had been paying. News Corp. wrote off some $350 million after the swipe, but the strategy helped the Fox Network reach parity with the Big Three...
...woman at the center of the storm? Lewinsky's deposition in the Paula Jones suit, scheduled for Friday, has been "postponed indefinitely" by the judge in the case, Susan Webber Wright. A good thing too, because a reporter from CBS tracked Lewinsky down at her mother's apartment in the Watergate hotel. Politely, she declined to comment. Had she needed to leave the building today, the media feeding frenzy would have made yesterday's Kenneth Starr camera-crew-crush look like Sunday brunch...