The Morning Fix: Box office blues ... or not? Sumner's eye for talent. Versus wants soccer

After the coffee. Before wondering if Al Gore had just seen "Solitary Man" when he and Tipper decided to split.

Nielsen goes public. TV ratings service Nielsen has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise $1.75 billion in an initial public offering. Bloomberg says the company wants to use the proceeds to lower its $8.6-billion debt load. Nielsen is owned by several private equity firms including Blackstone Group, Carlyle Group and KKR. The filing will likely also detail Nielsen's revenue streams. The filing said Nielsen had earnings of about $1.3 billion on revenues of $4.8 billion in 2009.

The Conan factor. Turner Broadcasting is looking to get the same rate for commercials for Conan O'Brien that the broadcast networks get for their late-night shows. The New York Post says TBS wants rates that are 25% higher than the usual cable late-night rates. But many media buyers say TBS is dreaming. "He's a high-priced property that they clearly overpaid for," one buyer told the paper.

Box office fatigue. One bad holiday weekend and everyone starts analyzing what's wrong with the movie biz. Yeah, "Prince of Persia" disappointed, as did "Sex and the City 2." No, it didn't have anything to do with hockey or basketball. Is it a sign of tough times ahead? Probably not. As Hot Blog notes, there are already seven movies that made over $100 million in the U.S., two of which were sequels and one was a remake. Summer 2010, Hot Blog says, "always looked soft from a distance. Why? Because of a lack of sequels. No Spider-Man, Batman, Transformers, Bourne, or Harry Potter."

Sumner's eye for talent. The Daily Beast's Peter Lauria has a tawdry story about Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone becoming smitten with a girl group called the "Electric Barbarellas" that he wants to see on MTV. Redstone, Lauria reports, is pressuring MTV chief Judy McGrath to put the program on, and she is resisting. All I know is what Sumner wants Sumner usually gets.

Whatever happened to going with your gut? OTX, an online test-screening service, is now going to start a "script evaluation division," according to Variety. OTX President Vincent Bruzzese told the paper that the company isn't claiming to be able to forecast box office based on a script, but "we can give an assessment of a script's potential. We know what people will respond to." Isn't that what the studios and producers are supposed to do?

Comcast thinkng goal! Comcast's sports channel, Versus, has had some exploratory talks with Major League Soccer about a TV deal. MLS currently has deals with ESPN and Fox Sports. Comcast, is, of course, in the process of trying to acquire NBC Universal, and part of the plan is to use its sports assets to help build Versus into a serious competitor to ESPN and Fox. Broadcasting & Cable chief and soccer nut Ben Grossman has the scoop.

New big man at the Beeb. Former Nickelodeon President and MTV Networks Vice Chairman Herb Scannell has been tapped to head BBC America, the U.S. arm of the BBC. BBC America has had something of a revolving door in its executive suite over the last decade or so. The channel, which is in about 70 million homes, primarily carries shows from the BBC and other British networks. Scannell told the New York Times that he wants to make the outfit "a more diversified producer of television” and hopes to create more original programming on the channel. Will the shows be set in the U.K., and will the actors have to use British accents?

Inside the Los Angeles Times: Sean Combs finds his funny. John Horn on Roadside Attraction's "Winter's Bone." Vevo's Rio Caraeff is the king of online music videos. 

-- Joe Flint

It's cloudy again. ... Bring the sunshine by following me on Twitter at: Twitter.com/JBFlint

More media multi-tasking: Time spent watching TV and simultaneously surfing the Web up 35% in 2009

Seems there just aren't enough minutes in a day.

The amount of time viewers spent watching TV while at the same time cruising the Internet grew 34.5% last year to an average of 3.5 hours a month in 2009, up from 2.5 hours in 2008, according to a Nielsen Co. report released Monday.

The report seems to suggest that concerns by TV executives that the Internet was taking people away from their shows are unfounded. In fact, live TV viewing increased 1% in 2009. Add in time-shifted viewing a la TiVo, and the average number of hours jumped to a total of 163 hours a month watching TV in 2009, up from 160 hours in 2008.

Meanwhile, the amount of time viewers in Nielsen's panel who did both at the same time soared 35%, according to Nielsen's "Three Screen Report."

What are they doing? A look the top 5 sites visited by these media multi-taskers gives some clues:

1. Google
2. Yahoo
3. Facebook
4. MSN or Microsoft Bing
5. YouTube.

"You have people looking up stuff while they watch TV," said Gary Holmes, a Nielsen spokesman. "People are also doing a lot of social networking. People like to watch TV together. With Facebook as the No. 3 site, it suggests that people are chatting and sharing observations as they watch. You see it all the time with sporting events, too."

Anyone interested in coming over to our Facebook page and watching some NCAA March Madness on Thursday?

-- Alex Pham

Photo Credit: Mr. Thomas via Flickr.

Nielsen study shows there's a long road ahead to get people to pay for online content

Here's a shocker: When given the choice between paying for something or getting it for free, most people will choose free.

That's just one of the insightful findings from "Changing Models: A Global Perspective on Paying for Content Online," a new study from Nielsen. The research company interviewed almost 30,000 people around the globe about pay models for the Internet -- and if there's one thing the world is united on, it's that free is better.

This isn't news the media industry wants to hear. Nielsen says the free mentality is "strongest in developed countries with the largest populations of online veterans." In other words, the people with the money and the good broadband are going to be the toughest to convince to pay for content.

Nielsen's study doesn't really reveal anything that people can't figure out on their own. More than half of those surveyed are unwilling to pay even for theatrical movies online. No one is going to pay for amateur content. If there are lots of ads embedded in the content, that's also going to make people less reluctant to pay for it (there seems to be a disconnect with consumers who willingly shell out money for cable TV every month but want things for free on the Internet). Once content is purchased, consumers want to be able to copy or share it with anyone.

It's not all bad news. Almost 80% of those surveyed said if they subscribed to a newspaper, TV or radio service, they should be able to get its online content for free. This is a good sign for TV Everywhere, the initiative started by the cable industry that wants to make its content available online for free only to those who are subscribers to a cable TV service. Furthermore, one can take away the idea that if people want online content for free in return for paying for that content elsewhere, it will be easier to migrate those people to a Web-only business model.

It would be very easy to look at this study and say the odds of developing a pay business for online content are very long. But there's a roadmap to the future here. The survey says that almost 80% of respondents said that if content goes behind pay walls, they would not play ball, "taking it for granted they can find the same information elsewhere at no cost." Take care of that, and the dollars will follow. I know. Easier said than done.

Ultimately, getting people to open their wallets when they go online is going to be a long process. But people pay for water. They pay for cable and they pay $5 for a latte. Eventually getting them to pay for content that they would have to pay to see anywhere else doesn't seem like an insurmountable hurdle.

-- Joe Flint

Nielsen firms up plans for single-source media measurement

Nielsen Media is adding Internet measurement to its national people-meter television ratings panel, a move that is part of its goal to create a single-source media measurement system.

In a letter to Nielsen clients, which includes just about every major media company, Nielsen said it will begin installing meters that will measure both Internet and TV viewing later this month and hoped to be finished by August 2010.

The push by Nielsen to beef up its measurement process comes just a few months after a group of major media companies, including News Corp., Viacom, CBS, NBC Universal and Walt Disney Co., said they were teaming up to develop new methods to measure how people consume media. Calling themselves the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement, the group is launching a research fund, although it has insisted that it is not necessarily looking to build a competitor to Nielsen.

Currently, Nielsen has people meters in about 18,000 homes. Those meters provide the ratings responsible for billions of dollars in ad sales. As more and more people start to watch content online, on sites such as Hulu or YouTube, content providers and distributors want more detailed numbers to sell advertising. Nielsen measures online usage in a separate sample that tracks about 200,000 people.

-- Joe Flint

Nielsen meets with big clients to discuss Internet measurement

Nielsen Co. has wrapped an important meeting with 80 clients from companies that included CBS, NBC, ABC, Microsoft, Time Warner, Comcast and Hulu where the topic was how best to move ahead with developing a single-source system that will measure both television and Internet media consumption in the home.

The push from some clients is to get such a system up and running by late 2010. Nielsen has been pushing for the middle of 2011. Putting the squeeze on to move up the timeline are cable giants Comcast and Time Warner Cable, according to a person at the meeting. Both are pushing new online viewing services and have lined up several major cable networks to provide content.

Currently, Nielsen has people meters in about 18,000 homes. It's those meters that provide the ratings responsible for billions of dollars' worth of ad sales. As more and more people start to watch content online on sites such as Hulu or YouTube, content providers and distributors want solid numbers to sell advertising. Nielsen has been testing measuring for both TV and Internet viewing in about 395 homes. Nielsen measures online usage in a separate sample that tracks about 200,000 people. If you are wondering, like I was, why the Internet sample is so big, that's because while Nielsen only tracks about 100 channels, it follows 20,000 websites.

There was a "broad agreement" of adding Internet measurement in the households that already have people meters," said Sara Erichson, Nielsen's president of Media Client Services, who ran the get-together at the Harvard Club in midtown Manhattan.

The challenge, Erichson said, is finding homes that will allow for both the people meter and the software that goes inside the computer to measure Web watching.

"Tens of billions of dollars are transacted off of these numbers; we want to make sure that by asking people to do both, you don't have fewer people saying yes," she said. "Can we do it faster without negatively impacting quality" is the issue, she added.

-- Joe Flint

Photo: Nielsen's Sara Erichson. Credit: Nielsen Co.

Nielsen to powwow with media to plot combined measurement system

Nielsen is going to huddle up with its clients next week -- advertisers, agencies and TV networks -- over how best to combine measurement of online and over-the-air viewing of content.

In a letter sent to 75 clients, Nielsen said it was holding the Oct. 16 meeting as part of its ongoing process to create a one-size-fits-all system, which has been in the works for several years. The letter, from Nielsen Media Client Services President Sara Erichson, said, "given that more than $70 billion of television advertising is bought and sold using Nielsen ratings, we are careful not to take any actions that would dilute the reliability of the core television ratings data. Consequently,we are undertaking an extensive evaluation program before fully integrating television and Internet measurement." News of the meeting was broken by Claire Atkinson of Broadcasting & Cable.

Motivating Nielsen's desire for the big sit-down is the push by Time Warner Cable and Comcast Corp. to launch their own online programming initiatives -- TV Everywhere and OnDemand Online, respectively. "The purpose of this executive briefing is to explain the implications of OnDemand Online and TV Everywhere for television audience measurement and to outline what we are doing to prepare for the launch," Erichson wrote.

Nielsen has been testing measuring viewing of online content already. It currently has meters in 375 of the 18,000 homes it measures for TV ratings that are also keeping track of Internet viewing. That sample is obviously much too small to provide real trends but it is big enough for the company to see if it can introduce Internet measurement without contaminating the quality of the sample.

Of course, people are going to speculate that Nielsen's call for a huddle with clients is somehow tied to the recent announcement by 14 major media companies and advertisers to create the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) to foster development of improved measurement systems. A Nielsen spokesman noted that its plan for a new system have been in the works for three years and is not a reaction to CIMM. That said, many of the CIMM members will be at the meeting, so be sure to check them for hidden cameras.

The meeting will be held at the Harvard Club. Guard the silverware.

-- Joe Flint

Photo: Nielsen's Sara Erichson. Credit: Nielsen.