April 14, 2003
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PROGRAMMING
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BRIEFS
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CSTV GOES BETTER WITH COKE CSTV: College Sports Television received a $15 million investment from Coca-Cola Co. The deal gives the soft-drink maker $10...
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Cable Serves Up Fuel and Lights Fuse for Youth
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Youth will be served, and two newly named cable networks aim to do just that. Fox Cable Network Group last week named its new extreme action sports network...
BY JON LAFAYETTE
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Coming Up
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NAT GEO STAGES A MONUMENTAL CLIMB Fifty years after man conquered Everest, National Geographic Channel is taking viewers along as a second generation...
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FUELING UP
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Fox's firing up of a youth-oriented sports channel will make a competitive sports market even tighter. The space is already crowded with at least three...
BY JONATHAN BLUM, KAGAN
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DIGITAL PIPELINE
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BRIEFS
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S-A LAUNCHES NEW HD BOX Scientific-Atlanta has introduced the Explorer 3250HD, the latest product in its HD set-top line. Boasting 40 megs of memory...
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Turning Muppets Into Digital Assets
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Although ITV developments have been slow going, the need for programmers to embrace digitization is as elementary as A-B-C. To that end, Big Blue joined...
BY ANTHONY CRUPI
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MEET THE SYSTEM
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Good Things Really Do Come in Threes
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Sprawl is too gentle a word for the urban/suburban/exurban chaos known as Atlanta, where people live in their cars and cell phones are more common than...
BY STACI D. KRAMER
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COLUMNS
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ALPHABET SOUP
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Digital phones roll in Maine? Comcast expands HD retail deal? TWC does wireless HSD? Disney to test VOD
BY SHIRLEY BRADY
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General
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?PARTLY CLOUDY
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While TWC's 39% margins beat the industry's mean by about 4%, they are not on the same scale as an MTV. On a revenue-per-sub basis, the gap is even wider....
BY JONATHAN BLUM, KAGAN
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BRIEFS
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FCC'S GOT MAIL AGAIN Twelve senators sent a letter last Thursday asking the FCC to slow down its media ownership rule-making process. In a bipartisan...
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CABLE CONNECTIONS
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ABC FAMILY CHANNEL Tom Zappala to VP-program acquisitions and scheduling, from SVP-programming for Viacom. ADELPHIA Robert Daleo to regional director...
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High-end subscribers like new technology, and they don't care where they get it from.
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Too often, cable subscribers have been made to feel as if the industry views them as chattel, with new technology dangled as a reward for good behavior....
JIM BARTHOLD
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Late Breaking News
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HDNet Makes Deal With Sony HDNet signed a deal with Sony for 245 movies and TV shows. The Sony titles the HDTV channel now has the rights to air include...
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Mag Tied to Network May Give Lifetime a Boost
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Lifetime magazine is getting a bigger marketing push than the most successful TV-to-magazine effort to date, O: The Oprah Magazine. The new magazine...
BY SHIRLEY BRADY
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NCTA, CTAM Ponder Ways to Clear Up Consumer Confusion
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The message from digital cable marketers can be as murky as the Mississippi River rolling past the New Orleans hotel where some 1,100 participants gathered...
BY STACI D. KRAMER
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NEWS BRIEFS FROM CTAM DIGITAL
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BRESSLER ON THE BUSINESS MODEL Viacom CFO Richard Bressler dished out some tough love as the CTAM Digital keynote speaker, warning of the dangers to...
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PARTLY SUNNY ?
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As cable's sole 24/7 purveyor of atmospheric information, the Weather Channel has shown solid revenue and cash flows for most of its history. It even...
BY JONATHAN BLUM, KAGAN
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Ratings
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| Top 40 Basic Cable Ad-Supported ProgramsWeek of March 31-April 6, 2003 |
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RUPERT PAYS UP
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Rupert Murdoch paid a premium for DirecTV. Comparing per-sub valuations from the day before the deal to the day it was announced shows that News Corp....
BY JONATHAN BLUM, KAGAN
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Skirmish in Desert Over DTV
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There comes a point in every protracted war when the parties sense they are finally playing out the endgame. As that stage was being reached in Iraq,...
BY ALICIA MUNDY
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THE DISH ON DIRECTV
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As News Corp. lobbyists mounted a stealth campaign to derail the proposed merger of EchoStar Communications and DirecTV last year, they found the American...
BY MAVIS SCANLON, K. C. NEEL AND JON LAFAYETTE
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the Forecast Calls for Change
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Never visit the Weather Channel on a rainy day without taking the proper precautions. After all, this is a business built on delivering accurate information...
BY JON LAFAYETTE
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