NBC won the 18-49 November sweeps for the first time in nine years, but what does that mean come the last week in May? Even then, what does winning the "live plus same day" 18-49 season mean anymore?

An older man in a health club locker room looks at a TV screen and says,"Wow. That's an old commercial." The holiday marketing rush thus begins with the viewing of a Corona Extra commercial. This 15-second spot, run in recent years, features a shot of a Caribbean or Pacific island night, a small hut by a beach with five or six palm trees, not-so-quiet nightlife animal sounds, and a man whistling "O Tannenbaum." Then Christmas lights on one of the palms come on, offering an alluring contrary take on a holiday season picturesque tableau.

Competition for space on the TV screen seems to be where the real battle is. No, we are not talking about NBC having too many new comedies for too few time slots, nor about Fox having promising reality shows but unable to wedge out another weekly episode of "X Factor" or "American Idol" next January. At issue are apps like Netflix and Hulu that are increasingly finding their way onto connected TVs via deals with Sony, Samsung, LG, and others.

Two weeks after Superstorm Sandy knocked much of the East Coast -- including many Nielsen households -- off the grid, Nielsen held a meeting with its East Coast clients to brief them on some important developments, but essentially ignored the elephant in the room: Sandy. In fact, there wasn't even a room for the elephant. The meeting, conducted via a webinar, was thrown together when Nielsen's original national client meeting was canceled on Oct. 31 due to the aftermath of Sandy, and a powerful Nor'easter.

The big fourth quarter scatter market is always a benchmark for many TV sellers due to the push for end-of-the-year holiday consumerism. And this year's market is, well, iffy.

Not all video content on the Web is good -- consumer viewership numbers don't lie. And now, just like with TV networks, the biggest video digital platform, YouTube, is taking a page from traditional TV purveyors and canceling shows! Well, sort of.

Some $400 million in Republican fundraising to buy ads for the Presidential campaign may have been the biggest case of bad media planning and execution. But needy TV stations aren't complaining. On the other side, the hundreds of millions spent to re-elect President Obama looks like a great deal. But the key question is what will happen four years from now? Will any major political party make the same media mistake again?

During their respective earning calls In the space of a week, both Walt Disney Co. president/CEO Bob Iger and CBS Corp. president/CEO Les Moonves talked about looking for ways to get paid for all TV network viewing through metrics that would measure more time-shifted viewing, which could increase measures of program viewership by 30% to 40% during a week.

Awkward TV burst out on election night -- and we need more of it. No worries about Karl Rove questioning Fox News Presidential projections on live airwaves. I credit Fox News with being savvy enough to make a major Republican Party fundraiser a major commentator for its election coverage. Rove helped pull in some $250 million this past election, and we guess some of that media money made it onto Fox News. (Maybe not. Preaching to the choir can be wasteful media planning.) In any event, smart viewers could only find this all the more yummy for what followed.

In a post U.S. election period there isn't necessarily a fiscal cliff looming, though there could be a pay TV drop of some sort. Bernstein Research shows that, overall, pay subscriptions have been generally flat year-to-year when looking at all multichannel TV distributors -- cable, satellite and telco.