• by Wayne Friedman , September 8, 2010

Just days after the 2010 Emmy Awards Show, a rival Emmy-like TV awards has officially declared that it is going ahead with its own awards program to start up in 2012.

The Paley Center for Media is planning a new awards show for May 2012 in New York. No television or sponsorship partners have been signed on yet.

Rumors of the new TV awards show surfaced some months ago. Many observers say this comes in response to the lackluster TV rating performances of the Emmy telecast in the last few years. The ever-expanding categories have led to an unwieldy awards event.

The Paley event will be timed with the upfront TV presentations that the broadcast and some cable networks make in mid-May. The presentations occur just before TV advertisers make the bulk of their TV commercial purchases for the upcoming season.

The timing for the event also makes sense, considering how much TV talent is already in New York for the upfront presentations.

The event has been pushed by Steve Mosko, president of Sony Pictures Television, Tony Vinciquerra, chairman/chief executive officer of the Fox Networks Group, and Dick Lippin, chairman and chief executive of the Lippin Group, who were named to co-chair the Paley Center's new television awards planning committee that was formed in March.

As a longtime museum curator of television history as an art form, Paley wants to put its own imprimatur on TV awards. The group says it has already received considerable interest from television networks and advertisers.

At the same time that Paley is pushing this effort, the Academy for Television Arts and Sciences is facing tough negotiations for new TV contracts, especially given the recent decline in award show ratings.