Striking at one of the most sensitive issues of the talent business as the pilot season goes into production, The Walt Disney’s Co.’s ABC/Touchstone Television production unit has been pushing to reduce William Morris’ standard 5 percent commission structure for…
EchoStar CEO Charlie Ergen and DirecTV CEO Eddy Hartenstein have been making lots of promises lately to convince government regulators to approve the planned merger of their companies.But upon closer inspection, their sweeping pledges have lots of wiggle room. Take…
With six months to go before the new fall season begins, syndicators are cleaning up details on upcoming fall series and are already butting heads for projects targeting the 2003 season.Already out of the gate for 2003-04 is a court…
In the giant slalom at the Winter Olympics, U.S. skier Bode Miller was bested by Austria’s Stephan Eberharter and lost the gold because he was 0.91 seconds behind.NBC viewers-most of whom couldn’t imagine what a difference of less than one…
News personalities on the moveTalent was hopping last week in major markets. In Los Angeles, KABC-TV’s sardonic sportscaster Bill Weir will leave the much-coveted job. He told Electronic Media he is “absolutely not” going to stay after his contract is…
As expected, the Olympics continued to drive down overall ratings for syndicated fare during the February sweeps. However, many programs held up better than some analysts expected, particularly court shows and newsmagazines.For the sweeps period through Feb. 24, weekly series…
RealNetworks squeezes baseball to 30 minutesRealNetworks has announced several new innovations to its RealOne media service. The Gold release of RealOne adds new programming in a service called RealOne SuperPass. That service includes condensed Major League Baseball games. Every game…
A powerful Democrat wants the Bush administration to provide Congress with more information on its controversial decision to strip the Federal Trade Commission of its media merger review authority.At deadline, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., was planning to…
The NBC-HBO spat over movies based on the 1998 slaying of gay youth Matthew Shepard took an unexpected twist Friday when it was learned that NBC had accused HBO’s “The Laramie Project” of making unauthorized use of NBC News material.Within…
So here are the questions.Is the Koppel-Letterman drama a story of corporate greed driving corporate need?Or is it just the law of unintended consequences playing itself out as the need to keep Ted happy and on “Nightline” allowed the program…