Brits swooning over Moonves
CBS boss boosts b'casters by predicting bright future for nets
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If only.
Like CBS a decade or so ago, ITV's flagship web ITV1 is burdened by an aging audience, poor ratings, a dearth of hits and deep skepticism about the future.
Moonves is, of course, tied up repositioning CBS for the digital age, and the list of domestic candidates waiting to fill Charles Allen's CEO slot at ITV when he leaves gets longer every day.
But Moonves' upbeat prognosis for how network TV and its related businesses will flourish in the next decade -- regardless of social-networking Web sites, video-on-demand and other new-media applications lurking in the digital undergrowth -- surprised and gave a much- needed jolt of self-confidence to U.K. webheads.
"Moonves should be our new CEO," whispered one ITV exec as the CBS chief prepared to leave the podium after a show-stopping early-morning address to the Royal Television Society in London on Sept. 14.
In two Moonves master classes in the U.K. capital -- he was guest of honor at a media scribes lunch Sept. 13 -- the CBS topper's belief that TV's future is golden brought a welcome bullish note to an industry looking at a 6% downturn in year-on-year ad revenues and fearful that the Internet will do to TV what it's done to the music biz.
"When I came to CBS in 1995, I sat on a panel with (now Disney boss) Bob Iger," Moonves said. "He thought one of the networks would be gone by now. But they are thriving.
"I believe 10 years from now, people are going to be surprised how similar the world is in terms of network television."
Asked what qualities the ITV board should look for in Allen's successor, Moonves replied, a tad disingenuously: "I don't think they need any advice from me. They have a lot of smart people.
"The way I built CBS from last to first since 1995 was literally brick by brick and program by program.
"You have to be thinking about your current programming as well as how you get better margins by putting out on all sorts of platforms."
As for the Web depleting CBS revenues, Moonves insisted the reverse was true.
"We don't care how you get your content. By cable, over the air, over a telephone wire. We are going to get paid for that content over and over and over again."
But surely, persisted Endemol chief creative officer Peter Bazalgette, if auds are downloading shows like "CSI" -- a huge money spinner for CBS Paramount and Alliance Atlantis -- international buyers like Blighty's terrestrial channel Five will no longer pay premium rates for it?
"We believe there will come a point where downloading achieves a certain revenue point that potentially could be hurting viewership throughout the world," Moonves acknowledged.
"There has to be a way to make that up and change the model. For argument's sake, if 5 million less viewers a week in the United States are watching 'CSI' and our advertising revenue goes down on the network, I will be being paid for those 5 million viewers who are downloading it, either by advertising on the Internet or VOD. The same rule applies to international.
"It's going to be about sharing the revenue and how we go about doing that.
"By the way, if it is hurting Five, they will not be paying us as much money as they are at the moment for 'CSI.' "
Great news for Five, whose owner RTL CEO Gerhard Zeiler, speaking at the same London forum as Moonves, warned British webheads to stop "talking down" their businesses.
He repeated the mantra: "The future will be about content. The more distribution ways there are, the more important it will be. So content is king, but brand is king's boss."
It was a ringing phrase and a sentiment that Moonves likely would have endorsed.
