• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, February 11, 2009

For TV stations, it'll all come down to another Disney-ABC/iTunes historical media moment.

NBC Universal's Jeff Zucker and CBS Corp.'s Les Moonves have all but said what's coming, even before the crushing recession started to take hold: Sometime in the near future, TV stations may not necessarily be a part of traditional TV networks.

The lure of turning a broadcast network into a cable network, complete with advertising revenues and subscribers' fees, has always been too tempting, with the attraction of not one, but dual revenue streams.

It probably wouldn't make much difference to ambivalent TV consumers, who are less interested in their local TV outlets, and would make even less difference to the 30% of the country that has digital video recorders.

Imagine if you will that tomorrow CBS' "The Mentalist," NBC's "30 Rock" and ABC's "Desperate Housewives" could only be seen on channels 22, 24 and 27 on your cable system. Does it really matter they are not on channel positions 2,4, and 7, for example?

Whither broadcast network advertisers? Well, if there is no other place to get that programming -- and theoretically the audience is still large in comparison to first-run cable shows -- it could work. Those marketers may still pay broadcast-network-like -- not cable network -- CPMs.

Zucker has already said he won't let NBC become like companies in the newspaper, automotive, and music industries -- businesses too slow to change, unable to take the big risk when necessary.

Local TV station executives have already felt the shudders up and down their spines. Since that iTunes/ABC deal, many scrambled to ramp up local digital TV business, and recently put their hope behind the possibility of local programming sent directly to mobile devices -- especially their local newscasts, all supposedly a key local TV application for slowly crumbling businesses.

The problem with all of this: TV stations still give networks plenty of local marketing awareness and local promotion. In an age of fractionalization, no network dare take away hard-to-come by, modestly priced marketing resources that speak directly to viewers.

But look around: Local TV newscasts, once a means of virtually printing money for TV stations executives, are being trimmed back.

Ex-NBC senior executive Randy Falco has it right -- sometime soon one network will make a break for it and abandon TV stations altogether.

The cracks are already there. NBC says the 10 p.m. time period is now, in essence, a syndication block of programming for stations. (Will stations get a better barter advertising split? We doubt it).

A bigger crack took place a couple of years before, when Disney-ABC went over the wall with its revolutionary iTunes deal that started a plethora of network TV Internet video activity.

Broadcast networks probably feel like inmates -- restless, not getting enough to eat, unwashed, and wanting a long high-class road trip to freedom. They won't be stopping for Slurpees.