Over the past few weeks, the licensing team at CBS (CBS) has been as busy as a snowplow driver with a bevy of deals that will bring the top-rated network’s fare to cable TV and online subscription services. The content arrangements that CBS and a few rivals are negotiating these days aren’t always quite the same as the programming deals that have underpinned the television syndication market for decades.
Some highly rated shows, such as CBS’s Elementary and Scandal from ABC Television Group (DIS), are being sold far earlier in their life cycles, spurred by torrid demand from deep-pocketed cable television and subscription upstarts such as Netflix (NFLX), Amazon (AMZN), and Hulu. On Monday, in an example of the heavy-spending environment, Hulu licensed an additional 2,600 episodes of older CBS shows, bringing its total from that network to 5,300 episodes of 40 shows. And Netflix disclosed in its annual report that spending for streaming content jumped 30 percent in 2013 over the previous year, reaching $7.3 billion.
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
In the Sellers' Market for TV Shows, Streaming Comes Quickly
Bloomberg Businessweek reports:
