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Media Decoder Blog: ‘Smash’ Premiere Falls Short, Loses Viewers

February 6, 2013 by Leave a Comment

3:25 p.m. | Updated It may be time for NBC to change the title of its Broadway drama, “Smash.” After its second-season premiere Tuesday night, the show might more appropriately be called, “Smithereens.”

That would best describe what the ratings for Tuesday’s episode are likely to have done to the show’s future: blown it to bits. “Smash,” which NBC extensively retooled after disappointing viewers who initially responded well to its pilot episode, fell a staggering 71 percent in the rating for the audience NBC most seeks to reach, viewers between the ages of 18 and 49. It also fell more than 60 percent in total viewers from its first-season premiere, to 4.46 million from 11.4 million.

Possibly even worse, the show dropped 39 percent from last season’s finale, after “Smash” had already been subjected to a critical battering for its season-long deterioration.

The bad news continued in the pattern of viewers leaving the show throughout its two-hour length. It started out with 5.2 million viewers at 9 p.m.; that fell to 4.47 million at 9:30; 4.22 million at 10; and to 3.96 million at 10:30.

NBC most cares about reaching viewers between the ages of 18 and 49, because that is the group it sells to advertisers, and “Smash” fell especially hard among that audience. It started weakly with just a 1.3 rating among that group for its first half-hour; by its last half-hour it was down to a 1.0. The average of a 1.1 was by far the worst performance Tuesday night for any show on the major networks.

Last season, “Smash” benefited from being placed behind NBC’s music-based hit, “The Voice.” This season it does not have that protection, which was one reason it was exposed so badly. Another was ABC’s decision to try to beat “Smash” early by adding a special edition of “The Bachelor” head-to-head against it.

That strategy worked: “The Bachelor” averaged almost eight million viewers and a 2.6 rating in the 18-to-49 category.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/smash-premiere-falls-short-loses-viewers/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder: Resignation Suggests Rift Between CNET and CBS

January 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment

2:23 p.m. | Updated A senior writer for CNET, the technology news Web site, resigned on Monday, less than an hour after a report suggested that CNET was barred from presenting an award to a company being sued by CBS, which owns CNET.

Greg Sandoval, a former Washington Post and Los Angeles Times reporter who has spent the last seven years at CNET, said he no longer had confidence “that CBS is committed to editorial independence.” Mr. Sandoval announced his resignation on Twitter and did not immediately respond to an interview request.

A spokesman for CNET also had no immediate comment on Monday.

Mr. Sandoval’s resignation stemmed from a decision made last week to disqualify a Dish Network ad-skipping product from a CNET tradition — the Best of C.E.S. Awards. Promoted as the official awards program of the Consumer Electronics Show, the awards were presented last Thursday in Las Vegas.

A tablet called the Razer Edge went home with the Best in Show award. But Dish’s Hopper could have won it instead — if CNET hadn’t taken it out of consideration.

The Hopper is a digital video recorder that allows users to skip all the ads on prime time network television shows, with a feature called Auto Hop. The CBS Corporation, the parent company of both CNET and the CBS broadcast network, and several other network owners filed suit against Dish last spring. Dish countersued at the same time and asserted that the feature “does not infringe any copyrights that could be claimed by the major networks.”

The litigation is pending. In the meantime, Dish continues to promote the Hopper and add new functions to it. At C.E.S. last week, Dish showed off a faster, spiffier version of the product with the ability to transfer recorded shows to iPads. CNET’s reviewer was impressed. But the Best of C.E.S. Awards became another battleground for CBS and Dish.

CNET attached a disclaimer to its awards announcement on Thursday that read, “The Dish Hopper with Sling was removed from consideration due to active litigation involving our parent company CBS Corp.” The Web site said that going forward, it would not review any products that are tied up in lawsuits with its parent company.

The outcry was instantaneous.

“We are saddened that CNET’s staff is being denied its editorial independence because of CBS’s heavy-handed tactics,” the Dish Network chief executive, Joseph P. Clayton, said in a statement. “This action has nothing to do with the merits of our new product. Hopper with Sling is all about consumer choice and control over the TV experience. That CBS, which owns CNET.com, would censor that message is insulting to consumers.”

CNET said it would continue to deliver “unbiased news” to readers. But new details about the controversy came out Monday morning and apparently influenced Mr. Sandoval’s decision to resign.

The Verge, another technology news Web site, reported that the Hopper “was not simply an entrant in the Best of C.E.S. awards for the site, it was actually chosen as the winner of the Best of Show award (as voted by CNET’s editorial staff).” When executives at CBS learned about this vote, they objected and ordered another vote with the Hopper taken out of contention, The Verge reported, citing anonymous sources.

The timeline “suggests a growing influence of CBS’s corporate interests in editorial decisions at its digital news subsidiaries,” the Web site added.

Mr. Sandoval’s resignation via Twitter came about half an hour after the Verge article was published.

“CNET wasn’t honest about what occurred regarding Dish,” Mr. Sandoval wrote, calling that “unacceptable to me.”

“I am not disgruntled,” he added. “CBS and CNET were great to me. I just want to be known as an honest reporter.”

On Monday afternoon a CBS spokesman released a statement that read:

CBS has nothing but the highest regard for the editors and writers at CNET, and has managed that business with respect as part of its CBS Interactive division since it was acquired in 2008. This has been an isolated and unique incident in which a product that has been challenged as illegal, was removed from consideration for an award. The product in question is not only the subject of a lawsuit between Dish and CBS, but between Dish and nearly every other major media company as well. CBS has been consistent on this situation from the beginning, and, in terms of covering actual news, CNET maintains 100% editorial independence, and always will. We look forward to the site building on its reputation of good journalism in the years to come.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/resignation-suggests-rift-between-cnet-and-cbs/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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News Analysis: For Cable TV Clients, a Steady Diet of Sports

December 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment

You are paying for it regardless.

Although “sports” never shows up as a line item on a cable or satellite bill, American television subscribers pay, on average, about $100 a year for sports programming — no matter how many games they watch. A sizable portion goes to the National Football League, which dominates sports on television and which struck an extraordinary deal this week with the major networks — $27 billion over nine years — that most likely means the average cable bill will rise again soon.

Those spiraling costs are fraying the formerly tight bonds between the creators and distributors of television. Cable channels like ESPN that carry games are charging cable and satellite operators more money, and broadcast networks are now doing the same, demanding cash for their broadcast signals and using sports as leverage.

And higher fees are raising concerns across the industry that cable bills may be reaching the breaking point for some consumers who are short of money.

The N.F.L. contracts announced this week “will surely enrich N.F.L. owners and players just as much as it will impoverish all pay TV subscribers, particularly those who will never watch an N.F.L. game,” said Matthew M. Polka, the president of the American Cable Association, which represents small cable operators. His group wants government officials to step in and make it harder for channel owners to demand higher fees for carriage and drop the channels when operators disagree.

Publicly expressing the private sentiments of others, Greg Maffei, the chief executive of Liberty Media, recently called the monthly cost of the media empire ESPN a “tax on every American household.”

Patrick Flynn personifies the consumer challenge. He and his wife, who pay Comcast $170 a month for television, Internet and a home phone in Beaverton, Ore., are keenly aware that part of their bill benefits the sports leagues that charge networks ever-increasing amounts for the TV rights to games. Save for one regional sports channel, he said, none of them are worth it.

“For the two or three games a year that our Washington Huskies are on ESPN, we can arrange for someone else to host the party,” he said.

But there are also millions of viewers like Russell Tibbits, of Dallas, who says, “If you eliminate sports channels from cable packages, I literally would not own a TV.”

Television and league executives argue that the vast majority of viewers not only want sports, but are, like Mr. Tibbits, willing to pay to watch a favorite team. On Sunday night, about 25 million people watched the New York Giants play the Dallas Cowboys on NBC — by far the highest-rated show on television for the night, more than tripling NBC’s average audience. ESPN, which broadcasts “Monday Night Football” and floods its week with football programming, is typically found by surveys to be the most valuable cable channel among subscribers.

But ESPN is also far costlier than any other channel, earning about $4.69 a month for each cable and satellite household in the United States, according to the research firm SNL Kagan. Next year the firm expects ESPN to cross the $5 a month threshold for the first time (the next highest is TNT, at $1.16 this year). On Thursday, ESPN announced its latest rights deal, one that extends through 2024 with the N.C.A.A.

“Sports is hugely popular in America,” said Edwin M. Durso, an executive vice president for ESPN, “and I think the prices that we and others pay for programming clearly reflect that.” Mr. Durso noted, accurately, that ESPN does not set retail prices for its content. But together with siblings like ESPN2 and ESPN Classic, the ESPN networks take in about $6.50 per subscriber each month, according to SNL Kagan. Other sports channels like Fox Sports Net, N.F.L. Network and Versus, soon to be renamed the NBC Sports Network, account for at least an additional $1.50 or so.

In the last few years broadcasters like CBS and NBC have started to posture for monthly fees from cable and satellite providers, and indirectly, those fees pay for sports programming, too.

Eventually, subscribers feel the pinch; “if you look at the whole media food chain, the last guy on it is the consumer,” said David Bank, an equity research analyst at RBC Capital Markets.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=c5576cdce42f4e7523ca65b60fd61a28

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