After a Fee Dispute With Time Warner Cable, CBS Goes Dark for Three Million Viewers

CBS stations went black just after 5 p.m. Eastern time. Both sides then issued statements blaming the other for being unreasonable in the negotiations, which were extended from Monday.

The dispute centers on what are known as retransmission fees, which cable companies have increasingly been compelled to pay to broadcasters, despite vigorous protest. CBS’s president, Leslie Moonves, has been a leader in seeking retransmission fees for broadcasters.

The decision to black out the stations means that Time Warner Cable subscribers will not be able to watch CBS programming until a deal is reached. In the past, subscribers have reacted with anger at such suspensions, but generally because they have missed specific programs. In this case, the summer programming roster does not contain many highly popular shows that might drive a settlement. CBS’s biggest appeal this summer is from the show “Under the Dome,” which will not have a new episode until Monday.

But the network does have the P.G.A. golf championship coming in a week. CBS emphasized on Friday that this week’s P.G.A. event was being led by Tiger Woods, who always draws viewers. And CBS, which broadcasts two soap operas, is also likely to gain support from those viewers.

Further down the road is the N.F.L. season, which might be a driving factor in why Time Warner Cable acted now.

Richard Greenfield, a media analyst who follows the company for BTIG Research, said the cable company was in “a once-in-a-lifetime position” to fight this battle because at the moment it does not face the overwhelming leverage of N.F.L. games and the most popular prime-time shows.

In addition, two top series on the Showtime network, owned by CBS, “Dexter” (which is in its final season) and “Ray Donovan,” are now also off the air, even though customers pay a separate fee for them. Time Warner Cable said it would offer a rebate to Showtime subscribers, as well as access to other subscription channels like Starz.

Time Warner Cable has insisted that the fee increases that CBS is asking for are unreasonable; CBS has argued it provides far more value than many cable networks that require much higher fees. Some reports have said CBS is asking for an increase of about 100 percent, to $2 a subscriber, from $1.

A spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission said that the agency was disappointed that the companies had not reached an agreement. “We urge all parties involved to resolve this situation as soon as possible.”

Despite recriminations on Friday from both sides, the negotiations are expected to resume as soon as Monday. That does not mean a quick settlement is likely, however. Mr. Greenfield said he could foresee CBS’s being dark “six weeks, if not more.” An executive close to the CBS side of the talks predicted 10 to 14 days.

In the meantime, CBS is sending messages on the radio and through other outlets urging viewers to complain to Time Warner Cable. The cable company, for its part, was telling customers to buy an antenna or sign up for Aereo, the new service that offers broadcast signals, and was also urging its customers to watch the missing CBS shows through streaming Web sites.

But for customers with Time Warner Cable broadband on Friday, CBS.com was blocking the streaming of shows, instead posting messages.

In almost every previous showdown over retransmission fees, the cable company’s stand has crumbled in short order. Mr. Greenfield said this time could be different because Time Warner Cable could take steps like appealing to Congress and selling CBS’s channel position to another bidder.

CBS stressed that it had never been taken off the air in a retransmission dispute and that it had not stopped offering extensions to keep the talks going.

Maureen Huff, a spokeswoman for Time Warner Cable, said, “We’ve accepted numerous extensions at this point, but it’s become clear that no matter how much time we give them, they’re not willing to come to reasonable terms.”

Brian Stelter contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 2, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated at one point which company suspended the service. It was Time Warner Cable, not CBS.

Its Viewers Are Graying, but Their Passion Pays for Fox News

Fox News continues to be near the top in cable television in terms of the number of viewers it attracts, but it is near the top in another category, too: the median age of its audience is among the oldest in television.

For most of the television business — the segment that relies on advertising — that would be serious cause for concern because ad sales are almost always based on a target age of 25 to 54, and Fox News, for the last two years, has had a median age of 65-plus in its ratings both for the full day and for prime time.

But up until now at least, Fox News has been more able than any other television entity to defy the tyranny of the demos, as they are known in the business. And the network, which has upturned traditions and expectations throughout its history, has earned consistently enormous profits, relying on the commitment and loyalty of its audience.

“I don’t think you can fully capture the value Fox News brings by looking at the Nielsen ratings alone,” said Craig Moffett, the longtime financial analyst who specializes in cable. Mr. Moffett, who heads his own firm, said that the key to Fox News’s continued financial strength has been “the level of passion and engagement” it inspires in its viewers.

That translates into big money because cable systems now pay Fox News one of the highest per-subscriber fees in television, 94 cents a month, topped in cable television only by a few networks, most of which have expensive sports rights to pay. (By comparison, CNN gets 57 cents a subscriber, according to SNL Kagan Research.) As Mr. Moffett put it, “There are a handful of networks consumers are deeply passionate about out of all proportion to Nielsen ratings, and distributors know if you don’t have those networks, then woe be to you.”

With close to 100 million subscribers in total, Kagan estimated Fox News will take in $1.11 billion this year from subscription fees before it ever sells a single commercial. Still, the network faces some significant questions as it goes forward: How old is too old? And when does the issue have to be addressed?

Fox News declined to make executives available for comment, but several recent signs — including changing personalities for some of its weekday programs — suggest the network may have decided the time has come to confront the issue of age.

Just how old is its audience? It is impossible to be precise because Nielsen stops giving an exact figure for median age once it passes 65. But for six of the last eight years, Fox News has had a median age of 65-plus and the number of viewers in the 25-54 year old group has been falling consistently, down five years in a row in prime time, from an average of 557,000 viewers five years ago to 379,000 this year. That has occurred even though Fox’s overall audience in prime time has actually increased three years in a row, from 887,000 to 1.05 million this year.

The network also has been faced with a recent string of nightly wins in that 25-54 audience by CNN, which had been hopelessly behind in recent years.

“The numbers indicate they haven’t been replacing the younger viewers,” Mr. Moffet said of Fox News. Many of the loyal viewers the network has always had are simply aging up beyond the 54-year cutoff for many ad buyers. The result is an audience edging consistently above that 65-plus number.

News audiences always trend old, and the viewers of Fox’s competitors are hardly in the full flower of youth. MSNBC’s median age for its prime-time shows this year is 60.6; CNN’s is 59.8.

In terms of the rest of television, Fox News also is quite a bit older than networks considered to have a base of older viewers. CBS has frequently been needled for having older viewers, but at 56.8, its median viewer is far younger than Fox News’s. (Viewers at Fox News’s sister network, Fox Broadcasting, have a median age of 50.2; at ABC, the median is 54.4; at NBC, it’s 47.7.)

Advertising: Longing to Stay Wanted, MTV Turns Its Attention to Younger Viewers

TRYING to win over a fickle teenager isn’t easy. Trying to win over millions of them every night is — as the kids say — cray cray.

But that’s exactly what MTV has had to do since its inception in the 1980s as the cable channel for disenchanted youth.

“Unlike other brands that get a lock on the audience and age with them, we have to shed our skin and reinvent ourselves,” said Stephen K. Friedman, president of MTV.

The channel is in the process of shedding its skin again, this time to appeal to viewers age 14 to 17 who have different preferences than the 18- to 25-year-olds who make up the older portion of the millennial generation (a cohort born roughly between 1981 and 2000 and also known as Generation Y or the Facebook Generation).

On Tuesday, MTV will introduce its latest deep dive into generational behavior: a nationwide study of 1,800 “young millennials.” The findings will be presented to marketers and MTV programmers to help show how the channel and its sponsors can speak to the younger end of the audience.

These younger viewers grew up looking up to Katniss Everdeen, the gritty heroine from “The Hunger Games,” rather than Harry Potter, the study says. Older millennials were told by their baby boomer parents that “they were special and gifted, with a magic wand capable of changing the world” and “the world is your oyster.” The Generation X parents who are raising this younger crop of millennials tell them “you have to create your own oyster,” the MTV study says.

Generational studies have been pivotal to MTV’s past success. Faced with double-digit declines in ratings in 2008, the channel embarked on an immense research project to try to understand the country’s roughly 80 million millennials and, in turn, to get them to want their MTV.

That study helped inform hits like “Jersey Shore” and “Teen Mom” and by 2010, ratings among MTV’s core audience of 12- to 34-year-olds had increased by 24 percent to 895,000 viewers, according to Nielsen.

“Candidly, we were hanging onto Gen Xers a little too long,” said Mr. Friedman, who called the 2008 research “a wake-up call.”

Last year, the average number of prime-time viewers age 12 to 34 fell 23 percent, to 834,000, compared with the same period a year earlier, according to Nielsen. (Jason Rzepka, senior vice president for brand communications and public affairs at MTV, pointed out that online streaming had affected nightly ratings, but that the channel remained the most watched basic cable channel among viewers 12 to 24.)

The new study, called “Young Millennials Will Keep Calm & Carry On,” comes at a turning point for MTV. “Jersey Shore,” the channel’s highest rated series ever, ended in December after six seasons. Around the same time, the channel began to notice shifts in behavior and tastes among younger viewers.

“Catfish: The TV Show,” a documentary series about online dating that had its premiere last year, emerged as a surprise hit with an average of 3.2 million viewers an episode and was the highest-rated premiere for an 11 p.m. series. MTV has attributed the show’s popularity, in part, to this younger demographic.

Alison Hillhouse, the vice president of MTV Insights who oversaw the study, said 14- to 17-year-olds were even more comfortable with social media and technology than their older siblings. She calls them “digital latchkey kids” because their hands-off Generation X parents have largely left them alone to navigate the Web.

Unlike the “Yes We Can” optimistic older millennials, this younger group of teenagers has a raised awareness of economic problems, MTV says.

“At age 13 they know they won’t find their dream job right away,” Ms. Hillhouse said. More than three-quarters of 14- to 17-year-olds interviewed said, “I worry about the negative impact that today’s economy will have on me or my future.”

Viacom, the parent company of MTV, is known for its in-depth audience research and for matching that research with marketers’ needs. MTV will take its latest findings to advertisers like Procter & Gamble, Unilever and Pepsi to help inform them about what type of ads will work on this more pragmatic group of teenagers.

“There’s always the research people at the table that helps us really ground the ideas in insight,” said Claudia Cahill, chief content officer at OMD, part of the Omnicom Media Group unit of the Omnicom Group. Ms. Cahill serves as the intermediary between MTV and brands like Pepsi, Hewlett-Packard and State Farm.

Research played a role in Pepsi’s “Live for Now” campaign on MTV and its sister channel, VH1, Ms. Cahill said.

“Marketers who aren’t of this generation have to use tactics to get these teenagers involved,” she said.

The trick for MTV will be to not rely too heavily on cultural anthropology. Skeptics of MTV’s approach say a research-based algorithm could never lead to the alchemy of Madonna in a conical bra, the couch-side cackles of “Beavis and Butt-head” or the first season of “The Real World,” when viewers got a first glimpse at “what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real.”

MTV will be taking its findings to writers and producers, but Mr. Friedman says he wants the findings to inform creators, rather than dictate what they create. Research, he says, is not brought into the development process until the channel tests pilots with focus groups.

“It’s a marriage of science and art, and you don’t want to underestimate the importance of the art,” Mr. Rzepka of MTV said.