Brian Steinberg

Will AT&T hang up on its quest for Time Warner if it can’t hang on to some of its most valuable assets? Answering that question could become paramount in the company’s effort to secure the $85 billion merger it proposed with Time Warner in October. Turner owns valuable sports rights, sharing with CBS the broadcast of the NCAA’s “March Madness” men’s basketball championship tournament. That event generated a record-setting $1.24 billion in national TV advertising in 2016, according to Kantar, a tracker of ad spending.

Hosting the evening newscast turned Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw into luminaries and national statesmen. ABC News has now declared that the person who leads that national institution no longer has to be the most important face on the screen.

This was a different decade, when the evening newscast was, along with something called a daily newspaper, a commanding source of the important news of the day. In this era of breaking tweets and smartphone alerts, however, the evening newscast has been weakened. A good chunk of people watch it, but another good chunk can’t even get home from work in time to tune it in.

These days, the best-known on-air personalities must instead be freed up to pursue original reporting and scoops that the network can “own” and blast across all of its shows, as well as digital properties.

onsider “CBS Evening News” anchor Scott Pelley’s recent trip to Jordan to cover refugees in Iraq and Syria -- a story that is likely to garner more attention and secure broader interest than his daily recital of the day’s headlines on the flagship show. In a memo to staffers about the shake-up, James Goldston, president of the ABC news division, took pains to look at the enterprise work done by both David Muir and Diane Sawyer. The importance of such efforts seems likely to increase.

NBC is wrapping its upfront in a different way than its broadcast-network brethren, securing more -- not fewer -- advance advertising commitments for its fall schedule.

The NBCUniversal-owned outlet expects to notch approximately 15% more in ad commitments for its primetime entertainment programming than it did in 2013 according to a person familiar with the situation. That could mean NBC secured around $2.3 billion from advertisers for its 2014 schedule, which excludes sales around “Sunday Night Football” and the Olympics. When adding sports and the rest of the broadcast-network schedule to the mix, the person familiar with the network suggested NBC had notched approximately $2.5 billion in advance ad commitments for the fall.

The company notched about $6 billion in commitments for its entire media portfolio, the person said, encompassing broadcast, digital and cable. CBS and ABC have both largely completed their upfront sales process, with media-buying executives estimating both networks lost volume for 2014.

Now that broadcast networks have begun to write business in TV’s annual “upfront” market, cable players are preparing to join the fray. Executives at Time Warner’s Turner suite of cable networks believe there’s an opportunity for volume gains in the 2014 upfront market, when US TV networks try to sell the bulk of their ad inventory for the coming season.

The company, which operates TNT, TBS, CNN, Cartoon Network and other outlets, senses advertisers holding back dollars in negotiations with broadcast networks, according to a person familiar with the situation, and feels only a portion of those dollars can go to digital outlets. Turner’s operating premise in the marketplace, this person suggested, is that marketers still want video advertising and won’t be able to tuck dollars away in their corporate pockets.

As such, the company is likely to seek price increases in line with the top of the broadcast market, this person said. NBC, which has seen a recent surge in the audiences between 18 and 49 that advertisers seek, has been pressing for increases of around 8% in the cost of reaching 1,000 viewers, according to media buyers and other people familiar with negotiations.

NBC is seeking around $4.5 million for a 30-second spot in Super Bowl XLIX, according to ad-buying executives, a whopping sum that could represent a new record for pricing in the gridiron classic, as well as a 12.5% uptick over prices sought for Fox’s 2014 broadcast of the event. NBC has also been asking potential Super Bowl sponsors to pay a similar amount for a package of ad inventory in other NBCUniveral-owned sports properties, according to ad buyers familiar with the pace of negotiations, including English Premier League matches on NBCSN and sports broadcasts on Telemundo and sister cable outlet mun2. Ad buyers suggested the Peacock’s initial efforts might meet with some resistance. “It’s $9 million to get a Super Bowl spot, which is a lot,” said one ad-buying executive. “They are testing the market. If enough people don’t do it, it’s only June and it’s not broadcast until February. You could adjust your price in October if you need to. It’s all about testing the market and maximizing the revenue.”