• CNNMoney, Wednesday, March 29, 2006 10:47 AM

It seems a little inside-baseball for a consumer site, but CNNMoney's does a nice job of fleshing out the coming TV upfronts, saying ABC is best positioned to negotiate top rate increases. However, the point that writer Paul La Monica most stresses here is that all of TV is at a point where it finally has no choice but to confront the new, transformative technologies: DVRs, podcasts, online downloads. Time-shifting of television content has the very real possibility of undermining the entire nature of the medium's advertising model. But not yet. That seems to be the prevailing POV in the industry. CNNMoney.com: "'Advertisers and the networks are aware of the accelerating pace of change, and that in order to remain valuable, let alone viable, the networks have to reflect the quickening pace of technology and incorporate it into their business model'" said John Rash, senior vice president and director of broadcast negotiations with Campbell Mithun, a Minneapolis-based media buying firm. Others argue, however, that advertisers may be talking tough about the issue of DVRs and other technology but, at the end of the day, most marketers realize that to reach the broadest audience, network TV is the way to go. 'Are advertisers seriously going to reallocate a lot of their money to podcasting, satellite radio and video on demand?' said Brad Adgate, senior vice president of corporate research for Horizon Media, a New York-based marketing firm. 'The DVR issue is very interesting but the use of DVRs is still rather minimal, so is it just posturing or will marketers come to loggerheads over this?' "

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