Time Warner Cable, the normally placid No.2 U.S. cable operator, is getting ready for a fight with its programming partners at the cable networks and broadcasters over rising affiliate fees. In truth, TWC has always been ready for a fight with the programmers. This time, it wants to make the first move and get its 14 million subscribers behind it.

The New York cable operator is launching an ad campaign “on behalf of its customers” to target what it sees as unfair price demands by programmers. It argues that these price demands, which usually come around this time of year at the end of programming contracts, can sometimes be as much as 300 percent increases. TWC says programmers make the demands “secure in the knowledge that video distributors are the ones who have to pass those costs along to customers and take the blame.”

So what’s Time Warner Cable going to do about it? They’re going to launch a website — yes, a website with the catchy URL: www.rolloverorgettough.com. News Corp, Sinclair Broadcasting and cable networks must be quaking in their collective fee-hiking boots.

(For the uninitiated: One way for companies to make money from their shows is to charge cable operators for the privilege of distributing them. Programmers like to raise those fees every so often. When cable operators resist, shows you like have a way of being held for ransom and sometimes disappearing for a while.)

Time Warner Cable’s website will allow customers to give their feedback and will be supported by ads in newspapers, TV and the Web.

“We want them to know why we fight so hard on these issues - if we Roll Over, they pay the price. If we Get Tough, they may lose their favorite shows until we reach a reasonable agreement.” said TWC CEO Glenn Britt in the press release.

It’s not the first time Time Warner Cable has tried to be principled about not overpaying for content. You might remember the great “Why is SpongeBob crying?” campaign of Dec 2008 when Viacom and TWC fell out over rising carriage fees.

Britt’s easiest solution to avoid revisiting this issue every year might not be to build websites, but to buy content companies like its larger counterpart Comcast is trying to do with NBC Universal. If nothing else it will give TWC more leverage in negotiations with some content makers — and they’d have to play nice.

Far be it for us to be the umpteenth person to assail Wired editor Chris Anderson’s much quoted and yet much maligned book, The Long Tail, but Time Warner would rather keep churning out more “Dark Knights” and “Harry Potters” than fiddling down its long tail, thank you very much

The Long Tail, as you may recall, argues that thanks to the digitization of content and much lower cost of distribution, content producers will see more of their sales and profits being generated by niche content i.e. the long tail of their sales graph.

But Time Warner, by many measures the world’s largest media company, says that while it is seeing more niche content sales, it would rather the humongous profits you can make with a super hit like “The Dark Knight.”

The executive charged with minding the tills,  Chief Financial Officer John Martin, told a Citi investor conference that the future of Time Warner is in the big hits — even on digital outlets like iTunes, where he said it is beginning to see sales trends getting closer to the physical stores’ with their focus on blockbusters.

As consumers have more flexibility and more control over the way they actually consume media, we see more and more of the usage going to the long tail niche content and more and more of the usage going to the long tail and more and more of the usage moving to the very very biggest hits and the biggest brands and that’s really the space we’re playing in.

Martin said his company, which owns cable networks CNN and HBO,  magazines like Time and Sports Illustrated, and movie studio Warner Bros, is seeing evidence of an increasing affinity for hits across all areas of its business.

Fewer and fewer DVDs account for more and more of sales according to Martin, the same thing is seen in magazine subscriptions with the top titles growing while some of the smaller titles slow down and more Top 10 shows are being recorded on DVRs by cable subscribers.

(Photo: Reuters)

Don’t ask The New York Times how much its new front-page display ads cost. The paper won’t say. That didn’t stop the New York Post from asking ad buyers. Here’s the answer based on anonymous sources:

$75,000 on weekdays and $100,000 on Sundays.

Assuming that the Post counts Saturday as a weekday, and assuming no discounts or other special deals (and assuming this blog post is not written by a reporter who nearly failed at least one high school math class), this works out to $28.6 million a year: $23.4 million for 52 weeks of Monday through Saturday and $5.2 million for a year’s worth of Sundays.

Despite the TImes’s silence, the ad cost sounds about right. The Wall Street Journal charges $90,000 for its front-page ads, not counting special discounts. Other details sound similar too. Here’s the Post:

Apparently, The Times is leveraging the front page space to get advertisers to increase their ad buys.

The paper is limiting the front page to big advertisers willing to spend more on top of their existing budgets.

A new advertiser who wants access to the space has to commit to buying the ad 26 times during the year - for a total of almost $2 million, ad buyers say. The Times has previously run classifieds on the front page.

The Journal’s program is similar: limit the front-page membership to big advertisers and get them to commit. CBS’s marketing chief George Schweitzer told us that the broadcaster has committed to a number of runs throughout the year, but declined to say more than that.

The front-page ad news, which the Times announced yesterday, might have stirred up some muttering in journalism academe like it did a few years ago when the Journal started doing it because purists aren’t crazy about sacrificing prime real estate for news on the altar of dirty profit. Nowadays, folks are a little less squeamish about making the big sale, especially when considering the health of the newspaper business.

On a side note, the Post –  now a sister paper of the Journal under New York Times enemy Rupert Murdoch — story tries to have it both ways. It notes that the Times is late to the game, yet runs a caption over a picture of black-eyed Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr that says that he is “smashing the paper of record’s vaunted Chinese wall between news and advertising by peddling front-page space.”

Apparently there’s no honorable way to make a buck in journalism.

Keep an eye on

• CBS and Time Warner reach fresh broadcast deal. Now you can keep letting your brain atrophy on television. (Reuters)
• Washington Post No. 2 newsman Phil Bennett resigns, goes to work on a project about the future of news elsewhere in the Post (They must have this project around for everyone they oust. Remember Susan Glasser). That keeps the paycheck coming until he gets his next job. This happens right after post.com Web chief Jim Brady splits after chafing under a new layer of management and frustration because of ongoing print-vs-Web issues. Meanwhile, new Post editor and former Wall Street Journal top editor Marcus Brauchli might bring in former colleague Raju Narisetti, late of India’s Mint business daily. Next week on 90210! (Wall Street Journal)
• If you think that newspapers slept through technology changes in the past 50 years, you would be WRONG. Jack Shafer explains why, and does it a lot better than I’ve managed to do over countless barroom conversations with all my friends who hate newspapers. (Slate)

(Photo: “Spiderman” Alain Robert got free front-page advertising on the New York Times. Not in the paper but on the building. We recommend a different advertising strategy that won’t get you arrested. Reuters)

Who was the big winner in the Time Warner Cable-Viacom dispute? A few newspapers, it seems, since they got a little extra holiday cash when Viacom decided to take out some advertisements and take their fight with the cable operator public.

Otherwise, the outcome is what many expected: the two sides reached a deal and nobody missed a single episode of “The Hills” or “Dora the Explorer.”

Indeed, here’s what Bernstein analyst Michael Nathanson predicted on New Year’s Eve, just when the fight between Viacom and Time Warner over fees was really heating up:  “As has been the norm, we would expect a settlement — terms undisclosed — in a relatively quick manner, as both sides may not want to see if this battle results in mutually assured destruction, as Viacom loses ad dollars and Time Warner loses subscribers.”

So what happened after a buildup that included advertisements splashed across newspapers like The New York Times and LA Times, leaflets passed out in Times Square, several increasingly snarky press releases from the companies accusing one another of being stubborn?

Nothing much, frankly.

The two sides reached a deal and issued this statement and a quote from their respective CEOs. “Time Warner Cable and Viacom jointly announced this morning that they have reached an agreement in principle to renew carriage for Viacom’s MTV Networks. The companies expect to finalize the details of the agreement over the next several days.”

But all this doesn’t mean that the disagreement wasn’t a big deal. Just the opposite. That Viacom and Time Warner would go to such lengths to make their fight public indicates just how much is at stake right now — both in terms of dollars and precedent — in these deals. Expect more to come.

Keep an eye on:

• U.S. album sales slid for a seventh time in eight years in 2008 as growth in the digital arena, one of the few bright spots in the ailing music industry, slowed (Reuters)
• Newspapers have increasingly sought to mitigate  staff cuts with alliances and partnerships with former rivals (Editor & Publisher)

(Reuters photo of spectators watching as a Dora the Explorer balloon floats in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade)

Viacom and Time Warner Cable are doing their best to make sure that television addicts around the country get a chance to go outside and stretch their legs come New Year’s Day. Of course, the reason they’re doing their part for physical fitness has little to do with ensuring the health of their viewers.

As Reuters reports, Viacom — the company run by financially challenged media mogul Sumner Redstone — provides programming to cable networks like Time Warner Cable for a fee. Now we’re at a time when Viacom and Time Warner Cable are renegotiating the fee, a regular occurrence. Equally regular are the disputes that arise as the negotiators try to determine what a fair price is.

The ultimate loser turns out to be you, the faithful TV watcher, because the last resort of companies like Viacom is to pull their programs off the air. The idea is that sends watchers into paroxysms of rage, usually directed at the cable company that they give all their money to every month. Eventually, the idea goes, the cable company cries Uncle! and agrees to pay more money to bring you the programming. Yes, your bill goes up too, as it always does.

Here’s a sample of what will stop being broadcast on Jan. 1: Dora the Explorer, SpongeBob SquarePants, The Colbert Report, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Hills.

And here’s a sample of the pre-packaged righteous indignation that you hear at times like this from the companies:

Viacom: Time Warner Cable has dismissed our efforts at a fair compromise… As a result, we are sorry to say that for Time Warner Cable customers our networks will go dark as of 12:01 on January 1st.

Time Warner Cable, via spokesman Alex Dudley: “It just smacks of desperation from a company that is trying to make up for a failing business model on our subscribers’ backs, and we’re not going to take it.”

Don’t worry C-SPAN will continue uninterrupted.

Keep an eye on

• Speaking of cable, the 24-hour news channels got record ratings this year, though it looks like they would have made Obama race against McCain for another year, if just to keep them relevant until the financial crisis is expected to ease. (Los Angeles Times)
• The Village Voice continues to shed the names that made its name so famous. The latest axe casualty is Nat Hentoff, the influential jazz critic who started there in 1958. Sketches of Pain, anyone? (The New York Times)
• Vicki Iseman, intentionally or not, was kind enough to wait until after John McCain lost his 2008 presidential bid to sue The New York Times over its February 2008 article that the lobbyist said suggested that she and the Arizona senator were carrying on inappropriately in more ways than one. (Reuters)

Verizon’s new fiber optic (FiOS) TV service added fewer subscribers this quarter with just 176,000 compared with 263,000 in the first quarter. This  surprised some analysts who had expected FiOS to continue its same rapid pace of growth, backed by Verizon’s huge marketing spend and aggressive push.

But Verizon Chief Operating Officer Denny Strigl (pictured)  told analysts the slowdown in FiOS TV growth was explained by the end of Verizon’s popular promotion giving away free high definition television sets.

On the plus side, not giving away TV sets helped keep mounting subscriber acquisition costs under control thereby boosting its bottom line, the No. 2 U.S. phone company told Wall Street.

Several Wall Street analysts and cable executives have derided Verizon for the billions of dollars it is spending on acquiring FiOS customers saying it will never make a return on its investment. 

But Collins Stewart analyst Tom Eagan says cable operators can’t relax just yet especially Time Warner Cable and Cablevision who have New York cable systems - an area Verizon is very focused on.

“We expect higher net adds in the third quarter with the roll out into Manhattan. Verizon stated this morning that it plans to aggressively promote the NYC roll out of its FiOS TV service and offer 100 HD channels., which is currently above the TWC offering,” said Eagan in a note to clients on Monday.

(Photo: Reuters)

Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield downgraded Time Warner Cable on Monday with one eye on Verizon’s launch of FiOS TV in New York (You have to register to read the link).

Verizon got approval to roll out FiOS TV just last week and is expected to begin installations as soon as August. Reuters ran an analysis last week that showed that Verizon’s roll-out of FiOS will be expensive for the phone company and its cable competitors, particularly Time Warner Cable.

Greenfield said New York City represents only 10 percent of Time Warner Cable’s subscriber base, but its average revenue per user is well above average.

Here’s where he sees Verizon earning points:

- His own anecdotal research found many TWC customer service reps hadn’t even heard of FiOS.

- Verizon’s customer service reps indicated early demand for FiOS is robust. (Greenfield accepts they might have been biased.)

- Triple Play pricing pressure could come to New York with Verizon offering a six-month promotional offer as low as $70 a month for TV, phone and high speed Internet compared with $120 a month for TWC.

Greenfield’s decision to downgrade TWC to “sell” from “neutral” is not just about Verizon — there’s the economy to consider as well. He still feels TWC’s earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) will grow by up to 10 percent, but said that requires strong performance in the second half of the year.

“TWC’s margins generally ramp in the back half of the year and political advertising should accelerate as the year progresses, however, the weakening economy does make our 2008 estimates feel aggressive.”

So who’s winning the pay-TV so far this year? With days to go until two of the biggest cable operators (Time Warner Cable on Wednesday and Comcast on Thursday)  report first quarter financial results, Reuters canvassed eight Wall Street analysts for their estimates of subscriber net additions during the period.

At first glance it doesn’t look like it will be a good quarter with these analysts forecasting Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Cablevision to lose around 100,000 basic TV subscribers collectively, while satellite TV plays DIRECTV Group and DISH Network will add around 320,000.

Even more worrisome for cable companies?  AT&T and Verizon added around 410,000 new TV subscribers between them during the quarter.

Yet at least one analyst cautions investors  not to read too much into cable’s basic video subscriber losses as this metric is not as important to growth as the addition of other revenue generating units in particular Internet access and phone.

“It would be missing the point to focus on basic video subscriber adds,” says Chris Marangi, an analyst at Gabelli & Co. which holds shares in Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision as well as the two satellite TV companies.

“Voice services and high speed data subscribers is what drives revenue growth,” says Marangi.

(Photo: Reuters/Glenn Britt (l), Brian Roberts (r))

Two sectors may be getting a new lease on life after the Wall Street Journal reported news that a handful of the top U.S. cable operators are exploring a joint venture with Sprint Nextel and Clearwire to create a national high-speed wireless network to fight off the telcos for subscribers.

Without a big infusion of cash, WiMax technology could be a non-starter in the U.S. So far, Sprint has planned to introduce the service in three markets.

Expanding beyond that may prove a tough sell for Sprint shareholders who had widely criticized its commitment last year to spend $5 billion on WiMax by 2010. Sprint is also struggling to keep its existing customers from leaving.

But with an estimated $3 billion in potential investment from Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks, Google and Intel, Sprint and Clearwire are poised to make life uncomfortable for AT&T, Verizon, DirecTV and EchoStar.

The cable industry has also dabbled in offering wireless services over the past few years, notably with Sprint. But with wireless penetration in the United States at over 80 percent, coming to market with a me-too offering won’t cut it anymore.

Is this the dawn of a new broadband arms race?

(WSJ)

Keep an eye on:

• Banks to Clear Channel: No way. (Reuters)
• Motorola to spin off handset division. (Reuters)
• Take-Two to Electronic Arts: Still NO. (Reuters)
• Fewer reporters on the U.S. presidential campaign trail? Blame the blood-letting in the newspaper industry. (NYT)

(Photo: Reuters)