Deep Value On The TV Dial

[SOURCE: Forbes, AUTHOR: George Putnam, Turnaround Letter]
For years, owning a broadcast (i.e. old-fashioned, pre-cable) television station was the modern equivalent of owning a gold mine. You controlled one of a limited number of information pipelines into the home, and advertisers were willing to pay dearly to get their messages into that pipeline. Today, with the advent of cable television and the Internet, things are less golden for the broadcast TV industry. Not only is competition greater, but advertising spending in all media is in a multiyear slump. As a result, the broadcast TV stocks have been beaten down. But it has become difficult to even find pure broadcast television stocks. The major television networks are all buried within much larger conglomerates -- ABC is part of Disney; CBS belongs to Viacom; NBC is a division of General Electric; and Fox is a part of News Corp. And many of the television stations themselves have been bought up by newspaper or other multifaceted media companies.
http://www.forbes.com/investmentnewsletters/2005/11/17/broadcast-televis...