With the attention of television professionals so often focused on addressing an endless stream of challenges, problems and changes, it’s easy to forget that television remains a very good business and an integral part of American society. As Thanksgiving approaches,…
Are Martha Stewart’s television programs due for a makeover?Ms. Stewart will stand trial early next year on obstruction of justice and investor fraud charges, bringing to a head a string of legal troubles that has damaged her reputation, pummeled the…
Viacom’s Showtime pay cable network will use the controversy surrounding “The Reagans” miniseries to help market the program, which originally was slated to air on sister broadcast network CBS.“The love story. The legacy. The controversy. The Reagans,” is the TV…
To help ensure that every person in the viewing audience is counted, Nielsen has a place on its People Meter for visitors to enter their age and gender. Visitor viewing is discussed from time to time by planners, who speculate…
Mitchell Stern, who has been chairman and CEO of Fox Television Stations Group for a decade, will run DirecTV when News Corp.’s acquisition is completed in the next few weeks, News Corp. announced Friday. Lachlan Murdoch, the News Corp. deputy…
The legal battle between Rainbow Programming’s American Movie Classics and Time Warner Cable has implications that go beyond the vitriolic charges filed in a $250 million lawsuit (TelevisionWeek, Nov. 17). The lawsuit charged that Time Warner Cable improperly announced termination…
Classrooms with too few books. Teachers with too many students. Students with plummeting test scores. It’s all part of the chronic underfunding of U.S. public schools.But there’s a bright spot, and it’s coming from that TV set at the front…
Thanks to cable, off-network dramas are selling better than ever. When Universal brought “Law & Order” to cable on A&E in 1994, the much-coveted NBC franchise player-now airing as many as five times a day on TNT-led a resurgence of…
You could call it video-on-de-Mandarin. Citing the fast growth of the foreign-language-speaking population in the United States, Cablevision Systems’ Rainbow Media Holdings is introducing new services featuring an array of programming from overseas, including China and Russia. Gregg Hill, executive…
The 77th Annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade kicks off the holiday season Thursday at 9 a.m. (ET) with live entertainment and more than 200 parade elements, including bands, cheerleaders, helium balloons and colorful floats. It starts with Tom Turkey and…