Digital Turf War

DIGITAL TURF WAR
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John M. Higgins]
There was something conspicuously missing from the hundreds of millions of dollars in commitments for the upcoming fall season: digital-rights deals between the studios and the networks. ABC has no rights to stream Warner Bros. Television Studio's The Nine on ABC.com. NBC has no right to sell episodes of Sony Pictures Television's Kidnapped on iTunes. CBS can't offer episodes of 20th Century Fox Television's Shark via cable operators' video-on-demand (VOD) systems. The networks have that flexibility only for new shows that come from the studios that they actually own. When it comes to deals outside the corporate family, networks and the studios supplying shows remain locked in a turf war, hardened in their financial demands for creating digital 'windows' for top-notch prime time programming. "The new business models are quickly evolving," says Bruce Rosenblum, president of Warner Bros. Television Group, whose studio will again be the largest supplier of prime time series next season. "It's incumbent, however, on the networks to share some of the revenue from the new business opportunities with their suppliers of their content and, in some cases, to their [station] affiliates." But the potential revenues from online-TV services are too uncertain to force the issue right now. "I don't think any of the networks felt they wanted to take the risk of trying to acquire digital rights from a studio and risk not being able to close a show," says Gary Newman, co-president of 20th Century Fox Television.
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