CBS Eyes Launch of 24-Hour Digital News Channel

NEW YORK: In an appearance on Bloomberg Television, Leslie Moonves, chairman and CEO of CBS Corporation, talked about the broadcaster's upcoming fall slate, drama franchises like NCIS, the case against Aereo and the development of a 24-hour digital channel that would serve as an alternative to cable news networks.

"We’re not in the cable space obviously," Moonves told Bloomberg Television's Trish Regan. "There are already too many players there for us to start a brand new cable network. So we thought with all the content going digital right now, wouldn’t it be a good idea to do a 24-hour digital channel taking all the resources that CBS News has…all over the world. And there is so much information that we get every day that doesn’t fit into a 22-minute news cast at 6:30 or CBS This Morning. So we can do that. We can go direct digital. That’s in the early stages under the tutelage of David Rhodes, the president of CBS News, and it’s an exciting alternative to cable news."

Moonves was asked about CBS's fall schedule announced this week, which includes, till the end of October, football on Thursday nights. "We’ve shifted down from eight comedies to six comedies. We still have Thursday night. We’ll still [have] four comedies after football is over, but having Thursday night football gives us so much flexibility."

Later in the interview, speaking specifically about NFL football —for which CBS shelled out $300 million for eight Thursday night games—Moonves said: "There’s nothing like the NFL. It is the prime property anywhere. The ratings continue to go up every year. To be able to get primetime NFL on our schedule, number one, it’ll allow us to win Thursday night. Number two, it allows us to move some of the Thursday shows elsewhere. Number three, when we launch our Thursday shows it will be the end of October. We can have the season with a lot less repeats. And number four, there’s no promotional tool like the NFL."

He continued: "We’re paying a billion dollars a year approximately for the NFL on Sunday and we will still make a profit. It’s must-have television. You have to have the NFL. And because of all the advantages you get from your station group, from your affiliates and from your network, it’s invaluable. So even though it costs a lot, we still make a lot of money."

Asked about the NCIS and CSI franchises, which have two extensions coming up in NCIS: New Orleans and CSI: Cyber, and if viewers are tiring of them, Moonves said, "These shows, these franchises make us hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. Actually they both have made more than a billion dollars for the CBS Corporation in profit over those years…. It’s not broke. Don’t fix it. Keep them coming until America says they don’t want them anymore, and they aren’t saying that."
 
Moonves also spoke about CBS passing on How I Met Your Dad, the proposed spinoff to the long-running hit How I Met Your Mother that wrapped this spring. "It just didn’t fit into our schedule. We only have one new comedy on the schedule, called The McCarthys. Unfortunately you only have seven days a week. You only have 22 hours of prime-time programming. We already renewed 21 shows going into this year. So we have more dramas on than new comedy and it’s unfortunate. Some things get left out."

Moonves addressed the case again Aereo, the Barry Diller-backed service that allows subscribers to access broadcast network signals online. "We obviously think Aereo is illegal. We think they’re basically taking our content, charging people for it and not paying us for our content. As I said, it costs a lot for the NFL. It costs a lot to produce NCIS and The Big Bang Theory and they’re taking our signal and basically selling it to consumers. Now when we do this with Time Warner Cable or Comcast, they pay us and then they sell it to the consumers. So we have basically said this is theft. The case appeared before the Supreme Court a few weeks ago. We think we’re going to win. We think the court is going to side with us. They did a very good job of confusing the issue, basically saying, well if you shut down Aereo you’re shutting down content on the cloud. You’re hurting new technology, which is absolutely not true. Look, we hope we win. We expect to win. If not, there are other things we can do to offset that…. We can go over the top right now. Ninety percent of the people or high 80s already receive our content right now through cable, satellite or telcos. They don’t receive it over the year with antennas. So it would just be circumventing the system. The truth is this wouldn’t be good for localism if Aereo wins. But everything we do would be coordinated with our affiliates."