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"Tinker has thought a lot about programming," notes Paul Klein, the curmudgeonly sage who was an NBC vice president before joining the Playboy Cable Network. "He's very good at that. He should be doing it at NBC. Instead he delegates it to a swami like Brandon Tartikoff [president of NBC Entertainment]." So why was Tinker hired? Says Klein: "His boss at RCA, Thornton Bradshaw, said Tinker has 'bearing.' I think the stockholders might be happier if he was a hunchback with a bad mole, and put them in No. 1. But even if NBC gets there, it won't mean as much as it used to. Now it's just a bigger slice of a smaller pie."
Network executives counter with results of a Nielsen cable survey of homes plugged in to 20 or more channels. Only eight of those channels are watched more than an hour a week. As Gene Jankowski, president of the CBS Broadcast Group, notes: "Nobody buys technology for its own sake. You buy the new video technology because it provides a message you can't receive through other means. But it's not the only message, or even the most important one. The networks are. They are the only national instantaneous distribution system, and are likely to remain so."
Jankowski is not talking about quality entertainment here. He is defining the networks' primary function: to make money, not by selling programs to viewers but by selling viewers—in bulk, watching a prime-time show—to advertisers. The ad agencies are still buying, despite skyrocketing rates ($91,000 for the average 30-sec. spot in prime time, up 125% since 1975). Says Louis Dorkin, senior vice president at the Dancer Fitzgerald agency: "The advertisers will keep paying these prices until they decide there's a better game in town."
Anthony Hoffman, media analyst for A.G. Becker, an investment banking firm, thinks that, on balance, the networks have done a good job. "The reason profits evened out in the late '70s," he maintains, "is not because the ratings dropped but because production costs were increasing, about 20% annually. In the past couple of years the networks have let some air out of their shows' ballooning budgets. And even if the overall share of the audience drops to 65% or so, they'll do O.K. Of course they'd like to get back into series syndication. Of course they'd like to see a couple more cable services fail. And they'd rather not see Ted Turner at the bargaining table every time they want to pick up a sports package. But they've still got the store pretty well locked up. People will soon get the word: the network business is coming back."