ORLANDO - Influential media industry analyst Tom Wolzien Wednesday said the broadcast networks need to move beyond negotiations designed to preserve their one-way distribution system and work with cable and satellite operators to create a "return path" that would create new, more powerful and far more accountable forms of broadcast TV advertising.

Nielsen Media Research says it will abandon its joint venture to roll out Arbitron's Portable People Meter as a primary measurement tool for media ratings. Nielsen might still license PPM technology from Arbitron to quantify television viewing outside the home. The big TV research company says the decision doesn't change its joint venture with Arbitron on the Project Apollo effort.

In wielding its strong market position, The CW has added five new stations to its network--deals negotiated on a more network-advantageous market-by-market, station-by-station basis.

ORLANDO -- The advertising and media industries need to speed the development of so-called "eBiz" solutions for media buying and selling or face the prospect of losing business to outsiders. That was the warning sounded Wednesday during a panel discussion entitled "eBiz for Media Report: Small Steps Lead to Success," at the American Association of Advertising Agencies' annual Media Conference and Trade Show here.

ORLANDO -- The magazine industry is beginning to test electronic advertising insertion orders, but still has a major obstacle to overcome--the inability to uniformly code individual magazine titles --before it can provide the kind of end-to-end transactional systems that the TV and radio industry have been building for Madison Avenue.

ORLANDO -- Spot radio has made great strides in e-business, particularly in electronic invoicing capabilities, a top agency executive said here Wednesday.