On Television

...They all pretended the upstart medium did not exist, rarely reporting on its doings, let alone reviewing or describing its offerings...

...Of the small networks, UPN is owned by Viacom, WB by AOL Time Warner...

...Each ownership change has brought a cost-cutting strategy that has usually afflicted news functions most...

...The big talent agency William Morris had its traditional party, where old-timers caught up with one another and traded stories about what has happened to the business...

...Only NBC lacks a studio...

...So much for what was once thought incredible...

...With most series now set at 22 original episodes a year, NBC was forced to commit wel 1 beyond a quarter of a billion dollars annually for one program...

...In a sense, this is not a new approach...

...No network is any longer owned by a company whose primary function is broadcasting...

...There was an era when countervailing forces set limits and standards...

...Viacom billboards...

...and, unlike ABC or CBS, a cable news presence in Europe and Asia to compete with CNN and Fox' siblings in Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation...

...After World War II, when American television first began to attract an audience, its sometimes unreliable black and white pictures were free to everyone who bought a set and installed an antenna...

...It is helpless before the demands of the other networks' producing studios...

...In conjunction with its agency, the advertiser establishes how much it will pay to reach how many viewers of what categories—those aged 18 to 34, as noted, being the most desirable...

...Yet calling it a promotion when the man in charge of one of the old networks' principal news broadcasts was moved to its morning show was baffling...

...Sporting events, obtained by paying license fees, were also known to change networks...

...Advertisers and networks stared at each other most of the month of June...

...CNN, the magazine company we once knew as Time-Life, and Warner Brothers studios are today parts of AOL Time Warner...

...Fox is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who owns Twentieth Century Fox studios...

...Nielsen ratings, network production details, shows being moved or dropped—all these became the grist of daily newspaper fare along with such traditional news as mayoral shenanigans, unusual weather and security problems at the local high school...

...There were perhaps a dozen schemes to bring the concept into the home, but none materialized...

...Mostly because it does not have a motion picture production studio...

...The Pfizer pharmaceutical company was reportedly negotiating a deal with Viacom worth $ 100 million...

...But it has become the reality that Today pulls in more money than NBC Nightly News...

...It would render pictures clear and perfectly defined...

...It was these sophisticates who were intrigued by two recent events that puzzled them because they seemed to go against accepted wisdom...

...There were presentations in theaters, with coffee and eye-openers all around, and that American staple, the bagel...

...In addition, the advertisers could not resist taking advantage of the change in their own condition from suppliants to dictators...

...They pay a monthly subscription for at least the basic service —the over-the-air stations in their locality plus such cable channels as CNN, Fox News, and some movie and sport stations...

...Few stop to think of it in these terms, yet today six out of seven Americans pay to watch television...

...From television's emergence well into the '50s, too, newspapers saw it as the enemy, their competition for public attention, for advertising and for influence...

...Americans would not pay for television, not through licensee fees à la the British, or over the phone...

...The buyers did not start coming around until the middle of June, the same buyers who by Memorial Day weekend last year had committed their clients to $8 billion worth of advertising on the six networks...

...Newspaper readers who enjoy reading about such things have become knowledgeable about sweeps months, crosspromotions, audience demographics, and other arcana having little bearing on whether programs are interesting or boring, socially useful or cynical trash...

...the MTV, MTV2, VH1, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central cable channels...

...For increasingly the age, income and status indicators of television audiences have become measurable...

...Barbara Walters is equally behind the curve of history...

...Mere days after the Procter & Gamble-Viacom announcement, other big companies and other networks were sitting down and talking...

...Its structure has been transformed...

...Those viewers are younger, however, and as the least interested layman knows, many advertisers prefer them...

...What has happened, among other things, is that the elaborate presentations, the parties, the discussions have become irrelevant...

...it is too small to survive against what has become its competition...

...The core group accounts for a larger proportion of the American economy and, defined in that way, may be the largest or second largest industry, as well as a very important export...

...Indeed, it is the network's single biggest moneymaker...

...Those involved flocked into town from across the country...

...Times, of course, were bad for all advertisersupported media...

...It is all done by ordinary, simple, third-grade arithmetic...

...ABC, Fox and the small networks followed, while CBS tried to hold the line a little longer...

...This will change how America lives, unless it is ignored...

...This was hardly surprising...

...Entertainment programs entered network schedules by chance, by lottery or by competitive bidding...

...Soon your computer terminal will also be your television set, with your telephone probably thrown in along the line...

...Meanwhile, the sales staffs of the old established networks are interested primarily in surviving another season...

...had established itself as not only a hit but the key to NBC's continuing suecess, Warner Brothers, then a division of Time Warner, raised the price for it to $ 13 million an episode...

...No one is left out...

...NBC News includes a major morning program and a major nightly newscast, as does ABC News and CBS News, but not Fox or AOL Time Warner...

...NBC, whose gross annual income approaches $7 billion, and whose parent, General Electric, is by share value the wealthiest company in the world, is too small...

...ABC is owned by Disney, which releases more movies than any other Hollywood studio...

...But there is no new era as yet...

...on Fridays to Wednesdays, to make room for a prime time family drama in which two divorced single parents try to maintain a romantic connection despite the complicated reactions of their respective children...

...Crucially, it appeals to a younger audience than does the newscast and is therefore, in the commentator's words, "more important to GE's bottom line than the evening news...

...But all that has faded even from memory...

...The recent change in degree, though, has been big enough to be a change in kind...

...BET also encompasses publishing, radio and Internet ventures...

...The executive producer of the nightly newscast was thus a person of consequence throughout the entire organization...

...Each report ends with a 12-second commercial for a nostrum its makers feel is related to what the viewers have just seen...

...Paramount Television Productions...

...and even, in some unexplained way, Viacom's national chain of Blockbuster video-rental stores...

...As technological advances allow those who can afford them to escape commercial interruptions, advertisers apply their ingenuity and engineers to ensure there is no escape...

...The latest talk is of broadband and digital, all leading to convergence...

...Then, if the new entry lives up to the springtime hopes, the broadcaster will charge a premium for the retained spots...

...it would usher in a new age...

...In fact, the measurers (called "research departments") are also quite skilled at forecasting the breakdown for programs not yet being shown, and function at virtually every broadcasting company, significant ad agency and major advertiser...

...it would make possible production tricks that could replace expensive dramatic settings...

...The most striking thing to a television professional is that an overarching decision is being made not by the unit that will have to transmit the advertising and decide how to place it with reference to program content, but by the top of the conglomerate itself...

...Although broadcast TV claims it still holds more than half the audience against the inroads of cable programming, most of its viewers watch it through cable connections...

...Next, turning to the smorgasbord table, it will pick and choose from the proffered programs purely according to their established or anticipated audience statistics, until its plate is filled...

...RECENTLY the business section of the Times featured a detailed article about NBC's need to grow...

...The philosophy here was neatly articulated by Deep Throat, who told Bob Woodward in that Washington underground garage, "Follow the money...

...a hugely profitable financial news cable channel whose only competitor is AOL Time Warner's CNN...

...Television's marketplace was a deserted souk...

...everything else they bought...

...To an advertiser, what is striking about bundling of this sort is that it delivers every segment of the audience—young and old, rich and poor, urban and rural, from Nickelodeon's children to the elderly who watch Dick van Dyke...

...This hardly commanded the public attention accorded to the moving of Barbara Walters and her stoic acceptance, followed by her recurring brink of tears, and then her implied threat to decamp to another network when her contract expires in a few months...

...Automobile manufacturers, for example, will pay more for them than the producers of denture adhesives or the American Association of Retired Persons, who place their commercials on the network nightly newscasts...

...An executive engaged in purchasing commercial time expressed the attitude of the whole industry: "There's no reason to rush...

...They would get theirs back for all those years of steady increases...

...the advertisers care only about the audience once it has been attracted...

...Usually they entail giving away commercial spots in other programs that have not already attracted buyers—or, in extremis, refunding cash money...

...When TV proved inescapably popular, editors came to understand that news and gossip about it enhanced their circulation...

...In news, on the other hand, the NBC formula—or where chance and accident have brought it—is by consensus the industry's most successful...

...News was, in fact, the only thing networks did themselves...

...All that adds up to a kind of war between viewing and advertising...

...So NBC always comes last...

...Staffs assigned to cover television exclusively as an established "beat" on a par with the Federal courts and state legislatures, grew from one to half a dozen...

...Conversely, when a network feels uncommonly confident about the drawing power of a program it has announced for the fall, it will keep many of the available commercial spots off the market during the spring weeks—the "up-front" season...

...Eventually, television's managers, executives and even pencil pushers were deemed no less worth writing about than its stars...

...The consolidations over the years have radically altered the network landscape: CBS is owned by Viacom, which also owns, inter alia, Paramount Pictures...

...An estimate published in the Economist puts the total world trade in what it terms the '"core copyright industries"—film, music, media, advertising, etc.—at $2 trillion, or 6.7 per cent of the global economy...

...Toys 'R' Us and ABC came to an agreement worth $25 million, with the toy company's arrangement said to extend to some of the Walt Disney Company's print properties...

...None of this would normally be of particular interest to an ordinary viewer, except that the period of reduced income coincides with the prospects for the next quantum leap in technology and fundamental revision in the internal structures and arrangements of the medium...

...the UPN network...

...They could as easily be on any other network, and some actually moved intact from one to another...

...But the laboratory advances keep making their way into the marketplace, where some succeed and some do not...

...They even refused to publish its program listings...

...The idea of anyone paying anything beyond that was considered ludicrous...

...These include the CBS network and the dozens of CBS-owned TV stations...

...The Hollywood studios that supplied NBC with its other highly successful series also jacked up the fees they charged into magnitudes approaching some national budgets...

...A few stations do a little of their broadcasting in HDTV, and a couple of manufacturers have HDTV sets for sale...

...Sunday editions included pullout sections with the entire week's schedule, plus vapid star-struck interviews, uncritical descriptions of new shows, and lots of profitable advertising...

...another was the rigorous, if often self-serving, oversight of the industry by Congress...

...During televised sporting events, the billboards already in place in arenas and stadiums are covered over imperceptibly by the messages of advertisers other than the indignant ones who had bought the original exposure on the existing physical space...

...In 1998, when the medical series E.R...

...A good and experienced network news correspondent, cut adrift in an economy wave, is now producing and voicing taped health news reports that are distributed free to stations...

...Transforming commercials to the point where they seem a natural part of a program's content could go a long way toward solving a potentially critical problem...

...Furthermore, any named product you see on any program—whether it is the product itself or an advertisement the camera seems to catch accidentally in the course of shooting a street scene—is there by commercial arrangement...

...In a groundbreaking development this spring, Procter & Gamble committed itself to $300 million worth of advertising in one year for its many products through Viacom's various media outlets...

...The other was the announcement that the executive producer of NBC Nightly News had been promoted to executive producer of Today...

...A few years ago, when the situation comedy Friends achieved the hit status that made it a vital contributor to NBC's enormous ratings success—both with the total audience and with the young viewers advertisers buy—each of its six stars demanded and got, $ 1 million for every episode...

...For more than a decade now, counterintuitively, organizational gyrations and financial prospects are what have really mattered in television...

...several radio networks and many radio stations...

...One was ABC's decision to move Barbara Walters and her 20/20 program from its long-treasured spot at 10 p.m...

...Ultimately, beginning with the august New York Times and gradually spreading through the corpus of the American press, what television companies did and to whom they did it spilled into the business sections...

...Although no one can prove it, the trade informally accepts that when a Hollywood studio seems to be developing a series with high audience potential it is offered first to the network within the corporate family...

...Aside from trying to help compensate for the presumably short-term drop in ad revenues, these tactics address a longterm concern: Audiences have become very annoyed with the frequency and intensity of standard commercials and are tending to zap them out...

...One of those forces was the requirement that each station justify its broadcasting license annually with documented claims of public service and enlightenment...

...TV has come that far from the days when network publicity departments pleaded with newspapers to print the names and broadcast times of tomorrow's programs...

...TV advertising is no longer bought or sold according to the nature or content of programs...

...In the days of the Huntley-Brinkley Report, or of Walter Cronkfte, a network's nightly newscast was its most important public face...

...A few small deals were made, but the rush of business did not begin until NBC blinked and cut its asking prices...

...The program that will so rudely displace hers, Once and Again, has in a different time period attracted significantly fewer viewers than 20/20...

...A recent trade publication commentary called it "NBC's ATM machine...

...The present slump in advertising income is leading all of TV—regular networks, local stations, and cable networks—to employ ingenious new methods of transmitting commercials...

...Nevertheless, pay television of sorts was tried for certain major events—notably heavyweight boxing championship bouts—that were projected by a very special TV receiver onto the screens of movie houses...

...When the moment arrived this spring for the networks to tell the advertising "community" about theirplans for the coming season, they held their customary big events to show off the new programs...

...The networks still look to the basic elements of a program to entice a desired audience...

...Remember the fuss when CBS blotted out some of the actual Times Square billboards in its millennial New Year's Eve telecast...

...Procter & Gamble was one of the earliest companies to sign on, in behalf of NyQuil cough suppressant and some of its other remedies...

...Observing that it was Procter & Gamble and not the networks that produced the classic soap operas of the great days of network radio and the early days of network television, Media Week goes on to quote a company marketing executive who speculated that, say, during Black History Month, the company might work with Viacom's BET (Black Entertainment Television) cable network to create a curriculum for schools...

...Elaborate protocols are invoked if a new program fails to reach promised magnitudes of audience categories...

...A survey done this past April, however, found that 82.5 per cent of U. S. households are now watching cable television, seven-eighths of them by wire and the rest via satellites...

...In these days of trouble, television is preoccupied with layoffs, buybacks and early retirements...

...After years of selling whatever commercial spots they cared to make available at ever-increasing CPMs (cost per thousand viewers), network sales executives sat waiting for business, or made fervent telephone calls they knew would be fruitless...

...NBC, it will be recalled, is wholly owned by General Electric...

...Suddenly program listings were a carefully wrought daily feature in almost every newspaper...

...Editor & Publisher reported newspaper advertising sales down 5.2 per cent in the first quarter of 2001 compared with the same period the year before...

...and, finally, there were the dedicated professionals, the network and station managers who felt maintaining standards was somehow part of their mandate...

...And the first advertising slump in over a decade has hit as the broadcasting business, internally and externally, has become far different from what it was...

...a 24-hour cable news channel, as does Fox and AOL Time Warner, but not CBS or ABC...

...This "bundling" might further blur the line between content and advertising, according to a report in Media Week magazine...

...It is almost two decades, for example, since we began hearing about something called high definition television...

...Messages, trademarks and logos also can be made to appear on playing fields or floors so that the home audience is subjected to them but not the spectators in attendance...

...King World Productions...

...This year, the up-front season was little short of a disaster...