52 lines
2.2 KiB
HTML
52 lines
2.2 KiB
HTML
From: Jms at B5
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<TITLE>The Last, Worst Hope for (95-12-16 03:18:33)</TITLE>
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[America Online postings by JMS]
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<A HREF="/cgi-bin/lurkfind">Search</A>
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<H2>The Last, Worst Hope for </H2>
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95-12-16 03:18:33
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<PRE>{how can people be interested in a show that's getting cancelled all over?}
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Kydreamer: what you have to remember is that the syndication marketplace
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is undergoing *huge* changes right now, and has been for the last year. In
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most markets, you're lucky if you've got even one or two independent stations
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(non-CBS, NBC or ABC). Between the growth of Fox, and UPN, those stations
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are now almost all locked down, and are required by contract to give
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preference to programming made by their affiliated networks. Now you've got
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2 hours a day that are available for prime-time programs, 8-10, that's it
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(most indies usually show news from 10-11). That's a grand total of 14 hours
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a week, and there are currently about 250 syndicated shows all competing for
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those 14 available hours.
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Usually, we rate between 30 and 50 overall, which is very good in that
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crowd of 250, so in most cases holding onto the station isn't hard. But in
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some markets, where the squeeze is on, and there's only one station
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available, if UPN or FOX pushes hard enough...the show goes. This has,
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however, happened in only about a handful of places out of something like 198
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total stations, so we're still pretty solid. The problem comes when 15
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people in one area all post messages that their station has dropped B5, and
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what people tend to see is that there are 15 messages about this, so it must
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be a big problem. (And in at least two, possibly three of those cases
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another station, sometimes a *better* station, has leapt in to pick up B5's
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contract.)
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We've had a number of preliminary conversations with the folks at WB to
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determine how best to adjust to this in the fourth season, which at this time
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is looking very encouraging. Several notions have been suggested by them to
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help counter or work with the changing syndication marketplace. Some of them
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are quite interesting, though it's too early to comment much more than that.
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jms
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</PRE>
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