On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television THE PARADOX OF PROFITS VS. VIEWERS By Reuven Frank Every Spring, newspapers break out in stories about a paradox facing the television industry. It is one that has...
...Messages are scattered, not concentrated...
...Movie companies happily quoted them, but no one took them seriously...
...Themost recent Golden Globe awards drew 50 million...
...Program executives hope a cranky public will choose one of their offerings to be the surprise hit that becomes the "appointment" program propping up their entire week, not to mention their bonuses, even careers...
...The wish is mostly nostalgia...
...Almost by itself, this escalation of the cost of sports rights is changing the internal arrangements of the networks...
...If the networks live long enough, they may find their schedules are no longer being put together by hyperkinetic, Gucci-loafered West Coast programming chiefs...
...Because stations are now rich and networks are mostly broke, and because top sports events greatly benefit stations, who get enhanced prices for commercials adjacent to them, they are now being asked, importuned, forced —the degree of intensity varies with the network—to share the cost...
...Cable's advance sales alsojumped doubling last season's...
...ABC, CBS and Fox have committed an amount sufficient to rebuild Kosovo, $17.6 billion, for the right to show National Football League games over the next eight years...
...There are four big networks today, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox, and two little ones, UPN and WB, as against 1,043 network advertisers: a lot of demand for not much supply...
...The escalating cost of presenting sports events is common knowledge, but the details are still staggering...
...Nevertheless, the cash keeps rolling in...
...The eventual application of that practice to entertainment programs and even news seems unavoidable...
...That is not to say profits are up...
...Yet they do draw audiences...
...For the dwindling time they have left, networks will be dominated by competition for and presentation of what will ineluctably be dubbed blockbusters, a term that during World War II referred to 2,000-pound bombs, big enough to destroy a whole city block...
...There will be miniseries, although recently they have not done as well as Roots or Holocaust, Shogun or Lonesome Dove...
...In the bowels of the network bureaucracies, fresh young faces and grizzled old heads can be imagined trying to devise new contests...
...The Emmy awards, television's own, also draw many viewers, few of whom notice when, as has happened several times, last year's Emmy broadcast is among those nominated for this year's Emmy...
...Established reporters asked to join...
...Audiences may be half what they were in the golden days, but networks are still the only way to reach a lot of people simultaneously, whether selling next year's car model or the President of the United States...
...Only NBC says its network business is in the black, and that is expected to end soon...
...For example, station managers can be expected to pay gladly for the Oscars...
...The answer to the now perennial question is the same this year as last...
...Other departing series have since delivered their valedictories to much smaller audiences...
...Someone will win and everyone else will lose, and the audience cannot know the outcome until it is announced...
...The Grammys, for recorded music, provide advertisers with high ratings, as do the Country Music awards...
...It might even add another 15 minutes to the lives of the networks, or another 85 cents to what they will charge for advertising...
...It could be argued that awards, and award programs, contribute nothing to public enlightenment...
...Baseball, hockey, college basketball, and several packages of college football follow in descending order...
...With them came entertainers, who drew the crowds forthe salesmen to pitch...
...That expenditure lets the agencies get used to the future while they continue to splurge on the broadcast networks...
...Their entertainment elements often feel false...
...Many more watched the Oscars when Titanic was the big winner than the following year, with no such universal favorite...
...There is a proven attraction to watching awards being given, perhaps because these are competitions...
...Zooming star salaries, production expenses and fees for sports events have affected the industry's bottom line...
...Each viewer appears to fixate somehow on one movie or performer or contestant...
...Then NBC contracted to televise these awards...
...Awards help networks...
...Instead, station owners in places like Utah and Tennessee may decide which programs they are willing to pay for and which they are not...
...It is one that has been recurring for a decade and gets harder to explain each year: If, as no one any longer disputes, networks are dying, why do they keep attracting increased advertising revenues...
...In these circumstances the gross earnings of the dying networks will keep rising until they are completely, certifiably dead...
...They should consider an award program for the year's best award program...
...Seventy-six million watched the last episode of Seinfeld, but like M*A *S*H in its time, it was a phenomenon...
...More buyers than sellers make prices rise...
...So, in just a few springtime weeks, advance, or "upfront," sales exceeded well over $7 billion for the coming season's prime time alone, a 12 per cent jump...
...TV commercials follow the same rules as gold bullion or Maine potatoes...
...The biggest efforts will be in sports, and in award programs...
...The Oscars were especially attractive to young women, the Super Bowl to young men...
...Seventy-eight million watched at least part of this year's Academy Awards, an audience exceeded only by the 84 million who tuned into January's Super Bowl...
...Even the three morning news-and-whatever programs, Today, Good Morning America, and CBS' still nameless and shapeless version, have proved themselves unprecedentedly attractive...
...There were comparable gains for the rest of the broadcasting day...
...Beauty contests, like Miss America and Miss Universe, do less well than they used to, but well enough...
...But buying time on its 66 nonpremium, advertiser-supported networks is like advertising in printed magazines...
...Award programs, on the other hand, are almost sure to pay off...
...For networks to reach tens of millions with such one-shots, however, they must operate at full tilt yearround...
...Forty-nine million heard Barbara Walters ask Monica Lewinsky to define phone sex...
...They pray for another Seinfeld or E.R., M*A*S*H or Dallas, that will run for years and exit in a blaze of glory with a special episode, and special promotion to swell the audience so the network can charge swollen commercial prices...
...NBC is paying almost $2 billion to televise National Basketball Association games on weekends for the next four years, and two cable services have bought the rights for the weekday games it could not accommodate...
...Broadway's Tony awards are an exception...
...These are the same Golden Globe awards that used to be a kind of journalists' joke...
...In the phrase "mass audience," both words have equal weight...
...This would resemble the system that governs public television, not always happily...
...They are coyly buying Internet advertising as well to learn how to do that...
...Next down the line are tennis and golf and horse racing and automobile racing—while cable channels, with more desirable time periods to allot and each year more money to bid, help drive the fees for TV rights ever higher...
...Similarly, the pallid entertainment schedules so pallidly announced in late May andearly June hide adesperate search for events to beguile multitudes...
...Costs have risen too, outpacing income...
...NBC plans to keep televising the Golden Globes...
...It is an American credo that it pays to advertise, and has been since the frontier days when wounds, animal bites and arthritis, among other things, were treated with "snake oil" medicines sold by salesmen traveling the back country in covered wagons...
...In three broadcasts, the association netted $3.5 million—or $42,000 per member, more than some of them earn as journalists in a year...
...That might be a blockbuster...
...Nothing else assembles customers like the Super Bowl, the Oscars, or Barbara interviewing Monica...
...A network used to share a percentage of the advertising revenue earned by its programs among its affiliated stations according to their size...
...Even though cable and other new media are gobbling up the audiences and functions of the once "big three," they will take in more during the season starting after Labor Daythan ever before...
...Over and over, some newspaper would expose the sponsoring Hollywood Foreign Press Association as having only 82 members, many of them amateurs or part-timers who had wangled press credentials from faraway editors so they could have an annual party that the studios would pay for...
Vol. 82 • July 1999 • No. 8
