Variety

Hosting the evening newscast turned Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw into luminaries and national statesmen. ABC News has now declared that the person who leads that national institution no longer has to be the most important face on the screen.

This was a different decade, when the evening newscast was, along with something called a daily newspaper, a commanding source of the important news of the day. In this era of breaking tweets and smartphone alerts, however, the evening newscast has been weakened. A good chunk of people watch it, but another good chunk can’t even get home from work in time to tune it in.

These days, the best-known on-air personalities must instead be freed up to pursue original reporting and scoops that the network can “own” and blast across all of its shows, as well as digital properties.

onsider “CBS Evening News” anchor Scott Pelley’s recent trip to Jordan to cover refugees in Iraq and Syria -- a story that is likely to garner more attention and secure broader interest than his daily recital of the day’s headlines on the flagship show. In a memo to staffers about the shake-up, James Goldston, president of the ABC news division, took pains to look at the enterprise work done by both David Muir and Diane Sawyer. The importance of such efforts seems likely to increase.

NBC is wrapping its upfront in a different way than its broadcast-network brethren, securing more -- not fewer -- advance advertising commitments for its fall schedule.

The NBCUniversal-owned outlet expects to notch approximately 15% more in ad commitments for its primetime entertainment programming than it did in 2013 according to a person familiar with the situation. That could mean NBC secured around $2.3 billion from advertisers for its 2014 schedule, which excludes sales around “Sunday Night Football” and the Olympics. When adding sports and the rest of the broadcast-network schedule to the mix, the person familiar with the network suggested NBC had notched approximately $2.5 billion in advance ad commitments for the fall.

The company notched about $6 billion in commitments for its entire media portfolio, the person said, encompassing broadcast, digital and cable. CBS and ABC have both largely completed their upfront sales process, with media-buying executives estimating both networks lost volume for 2014.

Now that broadcast networks have begun to write business in TV’s annual “upfront” market, cable players are preparing to join the fray. Executives at Time Warner’s Turner suite of cable networks believe there’s an opportunity for volume gains in the 2014 upfront market, when US TV networks try to sell the bulk of their ad inventory for the coming season.

The company, which operates TNT, TBS, CNN, Cartoon Network and other outlets, senses advertisers holding back dollars in negotiations with broadcast networks, according to a person familiar with the situation, and feels only a portion of those dollars can go to digital outlets. Turner’s operating premise in the marketplace, this person suggested, is that marketers still want video advertising and won’t be able to tuck dollars away in their corporate pockets.

As such, the company is likely to seek price increases in line with the top of the broadcast market, this person said. NBC, which has seen a recent surge in the audiences between 18 and 49 that advertisers seek, has been pressing for increases of around 8% in the cost of reaching 1,000 viewers, according to media buyers and other people familiar with negotiations.

NBC is seeking around $4.5 million for a 30-second spot in Super Bowl XLIX, according to ad-buying executives, a whopping sum that could represent a new record for pricing in the gridiron classic, as well as a 12.5% uptick over prices sought for Fox’s 2014 broadcast of the event. NBC has also been asking potential Super Bowl sponsors to pay a similar amount for a package of ad inventory in other NBCUniveral-owned sports properties, according to ad buyers familiar with the pace of negotiations, including English Premier League matches on NBCSN and sports broadcasts on Telemundo and sister cable outlet mun2. Ad buyers suggested the Peacock’s initial efforts might meet with some resistance. “It’s $9 million to get a Super Bowl spot, which is a lot,” said one ad-buying executive. “They are testing the market. If enough people don’t do it, it’s only June and it’s not broadcast until February. You could adjust your price in October if you need to. It’s all about testing the market and maximizing the revenue.”

An anti-piracy program launched in 2013 by movie studios, record companies and Internet providers sent out 1.3 million alerts to consumers that they were accessing infringing content.

The figures for the first 10 months of the program were the first official numbers released by the Center for Copyright Information, the group set up to implement the voluntary industry agreement designed to curb online copyright infringement.

The Copyright Alerts are sent to consumers in a “tiered system,” in which the initial notices are designed to inform or even educate users about the presence of infringing material. But if a consumer continues to access pirated movies, TV shows or music, ignoring the alerts, they may face penalties after the fifth or sixth warning that includes having their service slowed.

The center said that less than 3% of alerts were sent out to give those final warnings -- what the organization called the “final mitigation stage.” Some 70% of alerts were for the “initial education stages.”

AT&T will not force U-verse TV customers to take DirecTV service, if the telco’s $67 billion deal for the satcaster goes through, CFO John Stephens said.

“Customers will have their choice,” said Stephens, speaking at the JP Morgan Technology, Media and Telecom Conference. “They can stay on U-verse. This transaction is not based on freeing up wired capacity.”

AT&T at the end of March 2014 had 5.7 million U-verse TV subscribers, making it the fifth-biggest pay-TV provider in the US. “Our customers are very happy. They’re voting with their feet to stay with us,” Stephens said, noting that the telecommunications company has been adding about 200,000 TV subscribers per quarter.

Comcast exec VP David L. Cohen isn’t sure how the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed network neutrality rules will define broadband providers’ ability to charge for an Internet “fast lane” but said that in any case, the cable giant has the right to offer paid prioritization to partners.

“Whatever it is, we are allowed to do it,” said Cohen. Cohen, who leads the operator’s public policy and communications efforts, referred to the “almost hysterical reaction” to reports about the FCC’s revised net neutrality rules. “You have the whole world reacting to a document no one has seen,” he said.

Comcast has agreed to comply with the 2010 FCC Open Internet order, under the terms of its government consent decree for NBCUniversal, until 2018 -- even though the main parts of that order were struck down by the DC Circuit in January.

“We are not sure we know what paid prioritization, or what a fast lane, is,” Cohen said. “Fast lane sounds bad… (but) I believe that whatever it is, it has been completely legal for 15 or 20 years.”

As the Federal Communications Commission prepares new rules of the road for the Internet, more than 240 TV showrunners and creators have signed on to a Writers Guild of America West letter urging the commission to avoid regulations that would allow content companies to pay for speedier delivery to users.

The letter was the most significant response yet from Hollywood figures as the commission prepares for a key vote. In the letter, the writers argue that “if Net Neutrality is neutered, the Internet will become like cable television. A few corporate gatekeepers such as Comcast will be allowed to decide what content consumers can access and on what terms. The danger is that blocking, discrimination and paid prioritization could occur.

“This puts decision making and power over the Internet in the hands of the few, especially those with money. The Internet is too vital to the free exchange of ideas to allow the few companies who control Internet technology to edit the ideas and content that flow through it.”

The signers include an array of top showrunners, including John Wells, Matthew Weiner and Howard Gordon. “There are new buyers for what we as writers create. But if this new competition is unfairly pushed aside because the FCC adopts weak rules, rather than allowing consumers to decide what they prefer, neither innovation nor the best interests of society will be served,” the letter says.

After tweaking anchor Shepard Smith’s newsroom duties in 2013, Fox News has denied allegations that the changes were a result of Smith asking to come out as gay.

A story published by Gawker alleges that Smith was taken off of the primetime-aired “Fox Report” after attending Fox News topper Roger Ailes’ annual Fourth of July picnic with his reported boyfriend. Gawker’s story reports that around the same time, Smith was renegotiating his contract with the network and that he had asked Ailes for the go-ahead to publicly acknowledge his sexuality.

In a joint statement, Ailes and Smith called the story “100% false and a complete fabrication.”

Comcast continues to paint Netflix as a competitor, as the cable giant keeps trying to make the case that it needs to swallow Time Warner Cable to have a presence on a national scale -- and compete with what it portrays as surging digital-video rivals.

Comcast Chairman-CEO Brian Roberts said that with the TW Cable acquisition and subsequent spinoff of systems to Charter Communications, Comcast will add a net 7 million customers. That would give Comcast about 30 million video subscribers -- and Roberts noted that Netflix now has more than 35 million US subscribers. The merger will give “the industry a better opportunity to have a footprint regionally and hopefully nationally,” Roberts said.

In reality, Comcast and Netflix aren’t really directly competitive: They offer different kinds of content, and Netflix is not a replacement for the broad programming available on pay TV. Comcast does offer a Netflix-like streaming service, Streampix, but that’s bundled with TV and has a much smaller content lineup. In addition, Comcast’s video biz is far larger in dollar terms. Comcast posted $5.18 billion in video revenue for the first quarter of 2014, whereas Netflix generated $1.27 billion.