• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, March 3, 2008

It's official: Weekend nights are becoming the place for alternative sports.

Last season, ABC made headway in airing college football on the wasteland called Saturday night. For years WWE"s "Smackdown" had found a prosperous home at UPN, and, until recently, the CW. It moves to MyNetworkTV soon. In the 1990s, NBC ran its own TV wrestling events.

Now CBS has decided to take a poke at this trend, with a series of mixed-martial arts specials for Saturday night. CBS will tell you, not only is there a male audience on Saturday night for mixed martial-arts, but it's a somewhat upscale sport.

Big, varied TV audiences are not available on Saturday night any longer - a factor that's increasingly true on Friday nights as well. So targeting niche male-oriented programming, which typically garners high CPM premiums from advertisers, make sense.

Networks are figuring out that cheaper rights fees for sports are certainly a better deal than originally produced scripted fare -- and are even less expensive than reality shows.

Overall it makes for a better impression than re-running procedural crime dramas: It is fresh programming, and gives the network something to promote on that night.

In the past, networks went the safer route when doing these sports deals, just selling off the time, in what is known as time-buy deals. When WWE started on UPN in the 1990s, the WWE sold all the advertising time via a time-buy deal.

This works well especially for niche sports where network sales teams are never entirely familiar with endemic, niche advertisers of a skiing show, or a Gen X sports program.

But now networks would rather control advertising inventory these days. especially if there's any likelihood of them becoming modest performers. In CBS' and MNTV's case, both are paying an undisclosed license fee and retaining advertising time.

Is this a page from cable network's play book? Sure. Cable networks have worked weekend nights for a long time. In the fighting scene, a bunch of cable networks such as ESPN and Versus have done Friday Night Fights series.
 
With that in mind, look for broadcast networks to get more creative -- in a low-rent way. Anyone for a college basketball series, Gen-X series -- or a spin-off of "American Gladiators" ?