Fox, CBS unruffled by NBC-Comcast deal

NBC Universal needn't worry about a couple of its primary competitors trying to derail its merger with Comcast. It seems that Fox and CBS don't much care.

"From a macro perspective, I'm certainly not troubled by it," Chase Carey, News Corp.'s deputy chairman, president and COO, said Wednesday at the Milken Institute Global Conference. "Being that NBC is in fourth place, we sort of don't like anything to change," CBS president and CEO Les Moonves joked. "It will become a very powerful company," he continued. "There are other people out there that are worried that there may be some trade problems with that. I don't feel that way." Also top of mind, at least for Carey and Moonves, was the trend of cablers paying retransmission fees to broadcast networks. Carey said the fees were "truly way past due." "If broadcast is going to be competitive, it has to have a dual revenue stream," he said. Said Moonves: "All I can say about that is, it's about time. The fact is that networks are finally getting paid what they deserve from the cable operators. In a previous life, we weren't getting credit for the quality of the programming we were putting on or the tremendous sports rights we were paying."