• Wall Street Journal, Monday, May 8, 2006 11:15 AM

Warner Bros.' TV unit is offering local television stations that buy reruns of its “Two and a Half Men” sitcom a tasty freebie--the right to stream the shows on the stations' own Web sites.  The plan calls for Warner Bros. and the stations to share ad revenue for the online videos 50-50.  For local stations, this represents a significant perk.  After bellyaching for the last several months about how badly they have been treated by their network partners, which have been in a non-sharing mood when it comes to revenues from Webcasts of their shows, the local stations at last have something they can post on their own Web sites as content exclusives.  "The advertising industry is insisting on including the Internet as a component of their on-air buys," Bruce Rosenblum, president of the Warner Bros. Television Group, says. "This is a way for local stations to dramatically enhance the value of their broadband offerings."  The thinking now, says The Wall Street Journal, is that in the wake of the Warner Bros. deal, other popular shows in rerun heaven (think “Seinfeld,” as an example) may find their way to local stations' Web sites.

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