Super Bowl MVP Joe Flacco fired a few bombs to win against the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday, but by dropping the F-bomb on national TV during the Baltimore Ravens’ post-game celebration, he opened CBS up to a complaint at the FCC. The Parents Television Council, which fights indecent speech on the airwaves, asked the commission to investigate CBS for its failure to bleep out the offensive word.
NBC, CBS and ABC were to hold settlement talks with Dish Network regarding their litigation over the Hopper DVR. But the networks wanted to cancel and a meeting was postponed until a ruling on a preliminary injunction.
Making good on months of optimistic chatter, CBS and 20th Century Fox TV confirm the veteran comedy is readying its endgame.
The network should win in 18-49s and total viewers, getting a major boost from Sunday’s Super Bowl and the always-huge post-Super Bowl show. It also has the Grammy awards, which outdrew the Oscars last year, and The Big Bang Theory, broadcast’s top scripted show in 18-49s.
Exclusives
In addition to covering retrans rights for the CBS Owned Stations, the deal includes new online and on-demand availability of programming from CBS and Showtime.
The Bold and the Beautiful, The Talk, The Price is Right and Let’s Make a Deal all receive pickups and join The Young and the Restless, which previously received a pickup for the 2013-14 season.
When CBS torpedoed CNET’s planned “best of show” award for Dish’s Hopper, it may have also blown to bits broadcasters’ best chance for looser media ownership rules at the FCC. In a letter filed Tuesday with the FCC, public interest group Public Knowledge says CBS’s actions demonstrate unequivocally why the agency should ditch its proposal to loosen the rules, currently under review.
In legal papers filed on Tuesday, the network says that Dish concealed facts about the Auto Hop during 2011 negotiations.
Dish is using the recent controversy over the Best In Show award the satcaster’s new Hopper with Sling DVR did not receive as a recruiting tool. The ad-zapping service was awarded the top prize by the editors of CNET before they were overruled by corporate parent CBS which is suing Dish over Hopper. On Sunday, Dish bought full-page ads in several major newspapers to crow about the award it didn’t get and blast CBS.
CBS Corp. intends to hitch the wagon of several programs and assets to the grand event that is its Feb. 3 broadcast of Super Bowl XLVII. Not only will the company tie its CBS News and daytime shows to the Super Bowl, but it will also use the girdiron classic to draw attention to its CBS Sports Network cable outlet and a new sports-radio network it recently unveiled.
CBS Pushes For Broader Viewer Metrics
With new ways to watch TV shows, CBS now says it isn’t always the oldest-skewing TV network when it comes to its programming. Nina Tassler, president of CBS Entertainment, says the industry should expand the traditional TV ratings metric it sells to advertisers beyond the C3 metric — commercial ratings plus three days time-shifted viewing.
Whichever team comes out on top during Super Bowl XLVII, CBS is already a winner. CEO Leslie Moonves confirmed Tuesday that all of the available advertising slots in the game have been sold at a record average price of about $3.8 million, with some going for more than $4 million. That’s up from an average of about $3.5 million that :30s sold for on NBC last year.
Games will air on CBS, Fox and NBC beginning Jan. 5, leading up to Super Bowl XLVII on Feb. 3.
ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox got a step closer today to shutting down Alki David’s online streaming of their shows. Judge George Wu on Thursday granted the networks their mutually desired tentative preliminary injunction against the digital entrepreneur’s Aereokiller service.
The new show from Michael Davies and Mark Burnett will feature contestants vying for work with top companies.
Bernstein Research’s Todd Juenger says changing from the C3 to C7 ratings metric would just change the proportion of sales that go to broadcast vs cable, meaning it “would be largely a wash” for Big Media companies that have broadcast and cable networks. The exception is CBS, which collects relatively little from cable ads.
The Super Bowl is being streamed live online for only the second time. CBSSports.com plans to add social elements and new camera angles to entice even people watching on traditional TV.
The buzzed-about drama Golden Boy will have two showcase runs in the Tuesday 10 p.m. slot before setting into its regular Friday 9 p.m. berth on March 8.
Poltrack: Ratings Not As Bad As They Seem
Despite a season that’s been marked by vertiginous ratings declines, CBS research guru David Poltrack believes that broadcast’s slow start “is not indicative of how the season will progress.” Speaking Monday at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference, CBS’s chief research officer said that the fall ratings have been affected by a number of disruptive events, including numerous preemptions caused by the presidential debates and the late-October mega storm that caused major power outages in the New York and New Jersey.
As CBS works to sell the last handful of Super Bowl spots, Ad Age is back with its annual guide to advertisers’ plans.
CEO Les Moonves’ makeover of CBS has made him the reigning king of network television just as that realm is shrinking, laid siege to by a multiplying array of technologies. Now, the executive is looking to innovative digital deals, such as the one CBS formed with Netflix, to pull the network into the future.
CBS will present the 65th annual awards ceremony on Sunday, Sept. 22, 2013, from L.A. Live’s Nokia Theatre. Nominations for the Emmys will be announced on Thursday, July 18.
