March 29, 2024

Media Decoder Blog: The Breakfast Meeting: Fallon to Become Host of ‘Tonight’ and Ads Aim to Close Digital Divide

NBC has made a commitment to make Jimmy Fallon, the 38-year-old host of its “Late Night” show, the host of the “Tonight” show and to move the show from Burbank, Calif., back to New York, Bill Carter reports. Mr. Fallon would succeed Jay Leno, who will turn 63 next month and whose show still regularly leads the late-night ratings. The change would by fall 2014 at the latest. NBC has been desperate to avoid acrimony that often surrounds one of the biggest changes in late-night television; their attempt to replace Mr. Leno with Conan O’Brien three years ago ended with recriminations and a reversal, as Mr. Leno was reinstated and NBC endured weeks of negative coverage.

The Advertising Council and Connect2Compete, a nonprofit group dedicated to eliminating digital illiteracy in the United States, are introducing a public service campaign to help those on the wrong side of the digital divide find free classes to learn relevant new skills, Jane L. Levere writes. The campaign will reach out to what the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, said were the approximately 100 million people, mostly low-income families and minorities, who still do not have broadband in their homes. Ads will appear on television, radio and outdoors, and will feature a toll-free telephone number and texting service that provides information about free classes nearby after callers send their ZIP codes.

The new Big East college athletic conference chose an appropriate location for the its first party, given that its seed money is coming from Fox Sports 1: the Manhattan headquarters of News Corporation. On Wednesday, in the Fox News studio where “The Five” is produced, leaders from the seven Catholic universities that left the Big East gathered for a news conference with officials from Butler, Creighton and Xavier, their newly added conference mates, Richard Sandomir reports. The Big East presidents took a big risk two years ago when they rejected an ESPN contract for $140 million a year. Starting this season, the 10 colleges will share in a 12-year, $500 million contract with Fox Sports 1, a sum that will rise to $600 million if, as expected, the league expands to 12 members.

Critics of the government of the rightist Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, are decrying what they call bald attempts by his party to control the news media, judiciary, central bank and education, Dan Bilefsky reports. A long clash between Klubradio, a radio station that is often critical of Mr. Orban’s government, and Hungary’s news media council, which hands out frequencies to radio stations and is stocked with Orban supporters, is a primary example of the conflict; the station’s license was renewed last week after years of contention. Mr. Orban’s restrictive news media law has come under fire from the European Commission, news media watchdog groups and the Council of Europe. Government officials assert that since nearly 75 percent of Hungarian media is foreign-owned the idea of government control is ludicrous.

The computer networks of three major South Korean banks and the country’s two largest broadcasters were frozen Wednesday in cyberattacks that some experts suspect came from North Korea, Choe Sang-hun writes. The attacks, which left South Korean news crews staring at blank computer monitors and many people unable to withdraw money from ATMs, originated from an Internet provider with a Chinese address but the responsible party was still unknown, the Korea Communications Commission said. Many analysts speculate that North Korean hackers hone their skills in China, but their is little evidence to back them up.

Facebook’s Graph Search is a new tool that lets users search via phrase rather than keyword, and can turn up some interesting results if used correctly. Paul Boutin writes about how to make the most of the new tool.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/the-breakfast-meeting-fallon-to-become-host-of-tonight-and-ads-aim-to-close-digital-divide/?partner=rss&emc=rss

NBC Wins U.S. Television Rights to Four More Olympics

But Tuesday, Comcast responded with a knockout bid and a promise that it would show every event live, on television or online, a recognition of the immediacy of technology and a drastic reversal of NBC’s policy of taping sports to show them to the largest possible audience in prime time.

ESPN and Fox Sports also promised to carry everything live, but their bids were dwarfed by NBC’s during an auction held at the International Olympic Committee headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Comcast agreed to pay $4.38 billion for the United States media rights to four Olympics from 2014 to 2020, which eclipsed a $3.4 billion offer from Fox, a division of News Corporation. In an auction that allowed bids for two or four Olympic Games, or both, ESPN, a division of the Walt Disney Company, offered $1.4 billion for the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, and the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro.

Fox also bid $1.5 billion for the 2014 and the 2016 Olympics.

Brian L. Roberts, the chairman and chief executive of Comcast, said that spreading costs over four Olympics was critical to the bid, which was divided in two: $2 billion for the 2014 and 2016 Games, and $2.38 billion for the next two, whose locations have not been selected. NBC paid $2 billion for last year’s Winter Games in Vancouver (and lost $223 million) and next year’s Summer Games in London.

“We’ve said all along that we’d take a disciplined approach, where we could take a path to profitability,” Roberts said in a conference call. “It was responsible.”

Still, Comcast is paying considerably more than Fox to keep the Olympics in the NBC family than General Electric did for the Vancouver and the London Games. Neal Pilson, a former CBS Sports president, said, “I think Brian felt some pressure to validate the merger, and I think this also establishes that, as everyone felt, the Olympics were more important to NBC than they were to any other network.”

ESPN and Fox bid as if they did not feel they had to win the auction. In a statement, ESPN said: “We made a disciplined bid that would have brought tremendous value to the Olympics and would have been profitable for our company. To go any further would not have made good business sense for us.”

Craig Moffett, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, said Comcast’s winning bid was out of character for a company that has been “relatively cautious.” But, he added: “I think it’s fair to say that at this price, the Olympics are going to be a loss leader for Comcast and they will have a negative effect on short-term earnings. Still, strategically, it’s possible they can pay for themselves.”

By combining NBC’s broadcast and cable networks with Comcast’s sports assets, which include the Versus sports channel, the Golf Channel and 11 regional sports networks, Roberts said he believed his Olympic investment could turn a profit. Mark Lazarus, the chairman of the NBC Sports Group, said that there were more ways to make an Olympic profit “than the old NBC was capable of doing.”

NBC’s Olympic cable coverage has in the past been on the USA, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo and Oxygen channels. The old NBC was personalized by Dick Ebersol, who ran the network’s sports division for nearly 22 years until resigning last month in a salary dispute that was the climax of a power struggle with Comcast executives. Ebersol had been critical to every Olympic bid since the acquisition of the rights to the 1996 Atlanta Summer Games; he also engineered two pre-emptive bids within a few months in 1995 that brought NBC the rights to every Olympics from 2000 to 2008, at a cost of $3.5 billion to General Electric.

The timing of Ebersol’s departure puzzled Barry Frank, an executive vice president of I.M.G. and a former Olympic negotiator. “Why would you let Dick Ebersol go, and a month later, buy four Olympic Games, when what Dick did best, better than anyone else, is produce the Olympics?” he said Tuesday.

Clearly, Comcast felt it could could replace Ebersol in NBC’s executive suite with Lazarus, and replace Ebersol in the Olympic production control room with some of his disciples. Comcast is also ending Ebersol’s practice of tape-delaying many sports, especially the most popular ones, like figure skating and gymnastics, and more recently, snowboarding, to build a four- or five-hour prime-time program.

Even as NBC introduced online streaming, Ebersol nonetheless delayed showing some events during the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing and even more last year in Vancouver.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=460ed8a8e960b1f4a7421f33f6c9198e