Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [296]
RANDY FALCO, President, NBC Universal Television Network Group:
I’ll be perfectly honest: my first choice in all of this was to try to get a Thursday night package for our USA Network. The reason I thought that was so important for us is there are really only a handful of cable networks that have the rights to nationally televised sports. I wanted to take advantage of that if I could and separate USA Network from the competition. Obviously at the time Steve was trying to get a package for the NFL Network on Thursday night, so that probably wasn’t his first choice, but they were very good about listening to the prospect of us coming up with something for Thursday night on USA.
SEAN McMANUS:
Our main priority was keeping the Sunday afternoon package because I think that’s the most important window. I think we and Fox have the best packages—the highest rated by far, much bigger than Sunday night. That was our first priority.
One of the reasons we got as much money to spend from Leslie [Moonves] and, at the time, Mel [Karmazin] as we did originally back in ’98 was because Leslie believed the NFL could help him launch a lot of successful prime-time programs out of NFL football—and he did with CSI, King of Queens, NCIS, and many more. As far as I know, NBC hasn’t launched one successful show out of NFL football. So you can make the argument that the premium we paid to get football was worth it. I think Leslie would agree that one of the major reasons CBS was so successful in prime time was because of the hundreds of millions of dollars we’ve gotten in free promotional times with our NFL games.
With that in mind, we did look at Sunday night and had a plan. One concept was to start the Sunday night game at 8:45 or nine o’clock. The Monday night game used to start at nine o’clock. Our plan was to basically get off the air at, like, 7:15, which we do now, do 60 Minutes as a full hour, and then come on with the football pregame show. And the football pregame show would be collapsible, so even if the first game went into overtime, we could still do a full 60 Minutes and not be late for the second game. Also part of our plan—which I thought was really valuable—was asking for complete flexibility in moving any of our games on a two-week notice to the prime-time window. It would have been the ultimate flex scheduling. And they would have been all our games anyway, so it wouldn’t be like the lobbying we have now with the NFL when NBC wants one of our games.
We were asked to come in and do a deal for Sunday afternoon early before we needed to, and we got a deal done pretty quickly. Fox got a deal done pretty quickly too. We didn’t pay a large increase. We’re very happy with our package, and I think it was a good deal for both CBS and the NFL.
DAVID HILL:
Here it is in a nutshell: We make our money by selling ads on television shows, so we already make money on Monday nights. By putting football in on Sunday afternoons, we can sell ads and make some money. On Sunday nights we make money, on Monday nights we make money, so we never wanted Monday night. Sunday afternoon is just fine for us. As soon as you displace prime-time programming with NFL football, you lose a revenue stream.
RANDY FALCO:
I always looked at those kinds of acquisitions in three ways: Does it have marquee value? Certainly Sunday night did. Does it have strategic value? That would be if it would help us in prime time, and maybe give us time to rebuild the rest of our prime-time schedule and keep us relevant. And the third piece was the economic value. Now, here it seemed to me that if we were going to invest that kind of money, even though the NFL was a sure thing ratings-wise, maybe it would have been wiser for us to take the money and invest it in regular programming that we could build a franchise with—you know, along the lines of Law