• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, January 5, 2005

Turn out the lights, the party is almost over for Trio. Now the head-scratching hangover begins at its owner NBC Universal.

Over the weekend, Trio lost an expected 12 million DirecTV subscribers out of its 20 million cable and satellite customers, and NBC isn't likely to sit quiet with the outcome (even though many recent successful cable networks started with much less).

NBC could have included Trio with its other networks - USA Network, Sci-Fi Channel, MSNBC, CNBC, and others -- in its carriage negotiations with DirecTV last July. But it didn't and the network isn't elaborating.

You can't really argue with NBC Universal these days when it comes to cutting losses.

Since the mid 1990s, NBC avoided high-priced TV sports contracts - NBA, NFL, and Major League Baseball - all leagues it had aired. Critics were shocked when NBC abandoned these major TV programs. They predicted bad things.

Instead very good things happened. NBC stayed the No. 1 primetime broadcasting network, as well as one of two networks to be profitable (the other being CBS) over the last several years.

In recent years, NBC had the only consistently profitable TV sport -- the Olympics, a steady big time sport which averages anywhere from 14 to 20 household ratings points for the two-week event. Because of the high ratings and the global association of the sport, national TV advertisers rush to buy it.

Like other programming it abandoned, perhaps NBC looked at Trio as a network that would cost too much money to rebuild, especially in producing or buying expensive programming.

Possibly NBC also doesn't want to pay for more distribution to lift Trio's 20 million base to a more mature 80 million - a level that USA, Bravo, and CNBC have. NBC may feel Trio is the ugly duckling, and that can't be packaged with its more mature networks to advertisers.

It is a strange act in today's TV world where TV operators scrounge for any crumb of legitimate TV business assets to stay in the game. In NBC's case, it has significant leverage -- more than most other TV business entities -- to do what it wants.