No. MTV is Viacom, which was formerly part of CBS Corp.

I do think its a rather genius way to lower cost for a hurt network, will it work, I don’t know. Will I watch, maybe a few times. This week will gauge how well things are to come.

but he was on Real Time with Bill Maher a few weeks ago… and I have to admit, I sort of liked what he had to say. If any of that gets reflected in his new show I could maybe grow to be a fan.

But with trying to gain a huge audience, I doubt he does anything controversial or political or really speaks his mind. It’ll just be watered down nonsense to make every grandma, grandson, and grand buffoon laugh their asses off.

The workload on this show is probably a lot more and judging by the pressures that are associated with doing it five nights a week, even the most egotistical/insecure star (Leno?) would probably say “f-it” after a week or season. Either way, Leno will be “refreshing” in prime time and I am looking forward to the premiere. Now please send your hate mail to Jeff Zucker in hopes that he will get tossed out on his keester.

It’s like passing a car wreck. You want to see what’s up.

It’s not good to say that Leno will perform well against repeats especially with CBS where they repeat very well, it’s going to be weird seeing Leno third in a timeslot when he was first when he hosted the Tonight Show.

According to this article, Seinfeld got $600,000 for a 30 second spot in the 97/98 season, when it was averaging 32 million viewers and likely a 13-14 demo rating. Today, American Idol commands $700,000 for a 30 second spot, with ratings around 25 million and an 8-9 demo.

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-19483582.html

That season, the network upfront haul was $6 billion, while this season, it was $9.2 billion. Meanwhile, the overall audience has fallen 25% in that time. Even account for inflation, that’s quite a haul.

1.x? We aren’t talking about the pie shrinking any more, were talking about who gets the cookie.

Doug

The networks have increased ad rates per million viewers however they are still taking less money as eyeballs have fallen so far.

I heard an argument once where the TV companies really like fragmentation as it in effect costs advertisers so much more to reach the same audience, the problem is that each advertising outlet (TV, Internet, Radio, Newsprint etc…) gets so much less of the increased cake.

Maybe this is something we can find out for the last September-May season — I’ll check into it, it would be a good stat to have both for the whole Mon-Fri period and on a day-by-day basis.

Though theoretically, Leno’s relative summer season numbers should be better (though there was plenty of repeat fare and Dateline in the high 1.X range even in the summer).

Doug, I did find the bit about potentially abandoning Saturday interesting too, I don’t see that as a function of Leno vs. scripted the other nights so I didn’t include it. I’m not sure the affiliates of any of the networks would be clamoring to get Saturday night handed over to them though.

Another interesting point is the possibility of the networks abandoning Saturdays altogether. I see NBC as the first to do this, but I’m not sure, out of CBS, ABC and Fox, who would blink first. ABC, probably, as nothing they do on Saturdays has done anything in the ratings, save college football. Fox’s reality is likely almost pure-profit for the network, as is CBS’s re-run slate. ABC’s repeats, meanwhile, do such margin numbers that I doubt it would make a difference anyway.

But that doesn’t necessarily argue for scaling Leno back, it might argue for expansion! maybe twice a week there will be TWO hours of THE JAY LENO SHOW