RESPONSE Magazine - April 2018

continue to save major TV network companies — even as national TV advertising dollars suffer. Total broadcast retransmission revenues and cable network carriage fees grew 8. 5 percent to $10.93 billion in the fourth quarter of last year.

U.S. basic cable network fees ( excluding SVOD revenues) were up 6. 2 percent to $9.6 billion for the final three months of 2017, with broadcast networks’ retransmission fees nearly 29-percent higher at $1.3 billion.

Meanwhile, legacy TV companies are going direct-to-consumer with over-the-top (OTT) streaming video prod-ucts.;One example: Discovery Inc., the product of last month’s finalized merger between Discovery Communications and

Scripps Networks Interactive.
Discovery CEO David Zaslav hinted
at the possibility while talking with The
Wall Street Journal, saying a service with
content from Discovery, Scripps, and po-
tentially others could be priced around $7
per month. And Viacom has said it will
launch a direct-to-consumer OTT offer-
ing later this year that will complement
what it’s doing in the MVPD space rather
than compete with it.
Analysts say that, so far, most of the
OTT offerings from traditional TV play-
ers are designed to complement, rather
than disrupt, their cable bundles.
Another emerging trend: making
traditional TV more like digital TV, with
reduced commercial time.
Case in point: Fox Networks Group
reports it wants to cut advertising on its
networks to two minutes per hour by
2020. And NBCUniversal said it plans
to reduce the number of ads in its com-
mercial pods by 20 percent and the total
ad time by 10 percent on more than 50
original prime-time programs across its
networks. Turner’s tru TV has already been
reducing ad loads on its original programs
and plans to expand that trend during the
next three years, and its sister network
TNT has also experimented with reduced
ad loads in some original programming,
according to Turner.
Chris Linn, president of tru TV, tells
Digiday, “We’ve been stuffing content
with ads for way too long, and across
the landscape, you can see the negative
impact it’s had. For too long, everyone
has been leaning into what has worked
in the past, but that’s not what is going
to work moving forward. The bottom
falls out quickly if you don’t meet the
changing needs of your audience.”
Mark Marshall, executive vice
president of entertainment ad sales for
NBCUniversal, says the average episode
of NBC’s “The Voice” is watched for 35
minutes on live, linear TV, 43 minutes on
connected TV devices, and 48 minutes
on digital video recorders.
“It’s the same show, it’s the same piece
of glass, so why are they watching longer
on digital properties? Part of it is because
there’s a lower ad load on that side,”;said
Marshall. “The whole goal is to make TV
look more like digital TV.”
Dear Editor,

Iappreciated Chuck Wilkins’ well-writ- ten and thoughtful piece, “The DRMA Makes Networking Work” (Response, February). To add to the conversation, I’d just like to say that I wish we could get everyone who attends our industry events to buy a badge. With floor-only badges available at a nominal cost for non-members, there really is no excuse. Just like you pay your fair share of taxes, investing in these events is the only way to ensure;the infrastructure will exist for you to benefit from;them;in the future.

Despite this, there are lots of people
who have made a livelihood from this
industry — for dec-
ades — who show
up and draft off the
shows. To them, I’ll
put my sentiments in
as blunt terms as possi-
ble: if you’ve been in any industry for
more than three years and you can’t
afford to buy a badge to your industry
trade events, you really should be
thinking about strapping on the apron
at Home Depot. At least there, you can
be assured that the light bulbs will go
off.