Business

Pappas launched what was once the largest individually owned station group in the U.S.

Cox Media Group and Dish have ended a dispute over retransmission fees that lasted nearly a year and a half with “a new multi-year agreement that will restore all CMG stations on Dish, effective immediately,” the two companies said in an extremely brief statement Monday.

The league is in advanced stages of a new round of media-rights deals; Disney’s payments would increase under the proposed deal.

The company’s new office of the CEO thanked departing CEO Bob Bakish who left shortly before Monday’s call with analysts during which it took no questions. In the first quarter, the company’s total income increased 6% over the same quarter in 2023, to almost $7.7 billion, helped by Super Bowl advertising, which especially boosted the TV Media unit, which includes the company’s broadcast and cable network properties. Ad revenue was up 14%, thanks to a 23-percentage-point kick from CBS’s Super Bowl broadcast.

Wall Street rose Monday to start a week full of earnings reports and a Fed meeting.

The executive who has been a presence at several iterations of the company since 1997 will exit, effective immediately. A triumvirate of division heads — Brian Robbins, George Cheeks and Chris McCarthy — will step in to lead the company for now in a new office of the CEO. Robbins is president & CEO of Paramount Pictures & Nickelodeon and chief content officer, Movies and Kids & Family, Paramount+; Cheeks is president-CEO of CBS, and chief content officer, News and Sports, Paramount+; McCarthy is President & CEO, Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks.

The terms of the new deal would provide Paramount shareholders with an investment to pay down debt and buy back stock.

The U.S. ad market expanded for its 11th consecutive month in March — rising 4.3% over March 2023 — according to the latest monthly installment of Guideline’s U.S. Ad Market Tracker. Smaller ad categories outpaced the growth of the top categories by a margin of nearly four-to-one. While the top 10 increased spending only 1.9% over March 2023, all other categories expanded 7.9%. March’s growth was also due to a massive increase in digital vs. traditional media ad spending.

The Grio, Allen Media Group’s multiplatform media outlet catering to Black Americans, laid off staffers in a restructuring effort that is also eliminating the managing editor’s position, according to an individual with knowledge of the situation.

The three media companies planning to launch a much-scrutinized sports streamer later this year are set to give advertisers a sneak peek at the new outlet. Fox, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery plan to use their new streaming joint-venture — the official name of the video hub has yet to be announced — to boost the impressions they have to sell to Madison Avenue during the industry’s annual upfront market, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Beginning in mid-July, the price for Peacock Premium (with ads) will increase by $2 to $7.99 per month and Peacock Premium Plus (mostly ad-free) is also going up by $2 to $13.99 per month. Peacock Premium’s annual price will increase from $59.99 to $79.99, while Premium Plus is going from $119.99 to $139.99 per year.

Diamond Sports Group has reached an agreement in principal on a multiyear carriage renewal with DirecTV, reducing the number of big hurdles still in front of the bankrupt operator of the Bally Sports regional sports network to just one — a renewal of its carriage deal with Comcast, which expires Tuesday.

The veteran streaming and advertising exec will lead the company’s digital go-to-market strategy at Scripps Sports, Ion, Scripps News and local news.

223 Local Now FAST channels offering local news, weather and entertainment will be available to owners of LG Smart TVs.

New jobs posted to TVNewsCheck’s Media Job Center include an opening for a digital platform specialist. Other existing job openings include ones for an account executive, executive producer, meteorologist, weekend anchor, sales manager, senior newscast producer, digital video producer and reporter.

The spending that the industry’s giants expect artificial intelligence to require is starting to come into focus — and it is jarringly large.

The storied Hollywood company behind The Godfather faces its biggest battle yet as Shari Redstone’s merger plans collide with shareholder fury and a CEO on the outs.

Following months of vetting and public comment, an out-of-home working group of the Media Rating Council released the final version of “phase 1” of the U.S. marketplace’s standard for measuring ad exposure to the medium. Significantly, phase 1 deals only with “impressions,” while a standard for measuring persons-based audience exposure will come when a “phase 2” is created at an as-yet-undisclosed future date.

Confusion and anxiety reigned at a CBS-Politico joint party Saturday ahead of the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, with staffers shocked at news that Bob Bakish, CEO of parent Paramount Global, is set to exit abruptly as early as Monday morning. There have been rumblings about Bakish for days as the company enters the final stretch of exclusive merger negotiations with David Ellison’s Skydance. But his imminent departure triggered a wave of anxious speculation Saturday night in D.C.

Alphabet and Microsoft help Wall Street clinch its best week in nearly six months on Friday.

The entertainment giant would install a committee of top executives to run an “Office of the CEO” on an interim basis; no decision has been made on Bakish’s future.

In a rare development, two local news organizations in Colorado Springs — the Gazette daily newspaper and ABC affiliate KRDO — have ripped each other over the way they are covering something that has been central to the city’s identity for nearly half a century.