broadcast television’s most infamous prophet of business doom, is
turning optimistic about the industry — just five days before he leaves
it.
“I feel better about broadcasting today than I have
in a long time,” Zucker — who leaves his post as president and chief
executive officer of NBC Universal on Friday — told an audience at the
Zucker, who grew up in
has warned repeatedly that new digital technology is siphoning off
broadcast television’s audience and eroding its advertising revenue. He
coined the catchphrase “digital dimes for analog dollars” to describe
the industry’s declining revenues and even predicted a few years ago
that declining income would soon force broadcast networks to abandon
their affiliate stations and ship their programs to viewers directly
via the Internet.
But he said Monday that changes in broadcast TV’s
business model over the past six years have brought an infusion of
healing cash. The new willingness of cable companies to pay broadcast
stations so-called retransmission fees for carrying their content — and
the agreement of broadcast affiliate stations to share that money with
the networks — have rescued the ailing industry, Zucker said: “The
model feels a little better.”
It will feel even better soon, he added, because
broadcast TV’s share of the billion-dollar retransmission pie is only
going to rise.
“Broadcast audiences perhaps aren’t what they were,” he noted. “But they still dwarf cable.”
Zucker will lose his job Friday when cable giant
after 14 months of hearings and delays. Zucker wouldn’t discuss the
Comcast-Universal deal except to say that he thinks the industry is
headed for a new round of mergers and acquisitions. He was even less
willing to discuss what was probably the last big story of his
He would only say that MSNBC will have no trouble
surviving the departure of Olbermann, its most popular host. “MSNBC is
in an incredibly strong position, stronger than it has ever been,”
Zucker said.
His half-hour session at the NATPE convention was
mostly devoted to mapping out the rapid changes in broadcasting wrought
by the Internet and digital-video recorders, which undermine
advertising revenues because they allow viewers to zap past
commercials. Zucker said one of his proudest achievements was helping
to create Hulu.com, a website that carries programs from
“When we founded Hulu, people were stealing our
content and building businesses on the back of that,” Zucker said. “If
we don’t make it available on the Internet, piracy will rear its head,
as it did in the music business.”
Likewise, he added, broadcast television must make
peace with iPads, cell phones and other digital devices on which
younger viewers like to watch TV shows. “You cannot change progress,”
Zucker warned. “You cannot put the genie back in the bottle. … None
of these devices work without content. At the end of the day, content
is what matters. How we get paid for that is really the question for
next three to five years.”
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(c) 2011, The Miami Herald.
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