Network Competition Quotes

The TV season is a year-long thing now, and the networks are starting to look at it that way, thanks to cable, satellites, and competition.

I think its going to be continually tougher on the big networks as more cable channels do really interesting television. The big networks have a choice to make: Do we try to be all things to all people and get the shows that will deliver 20 million viewers a week? Are we the McDonald's of television? Or are we going to try to be more specific?

NBC programs great shows; it just doesn't have the eyeballs CBS does.

I know enough to know every time a cable show beats a broadcast show... you've attracted people outside the scope of what you normally reach.

Wireless carriers certainly don't need the federal government's help.

Television is more of a business. You can't take as many risks, because there's so many channels now, and the advertising's dropping.

I wouldn't be comfy going toe to toe launching a new scripted show against broadcast.

We have to compete in a universe of 200 networks, so we have to carve out our own niche, and to me, that niche is just basic shoe-leather journalism with some good journalists at the helm you can trust as presenters.

When I was trying to find work after drama school in London, it felt like the same actors always got the plum roles, especially in television. We have a smaller market place, vastly fewer drama-producing networks, and they seem to compete for the same established names for those projects.

There's still too much filler, copycat programming that's out there. We work so hard to pioneer new ideas, and then those ideas are just regurgitated by other networks. That's not good for anybody, I think. That's not good for our business. That's not good for our audience.

Getting into network television was tougher than I thought it was gonna be.

I think it's really good that you have great competition among news networks, and for that matter all the networks in general. It's bringing more and more people in to watching the news.

Television has a real problem. They have no page two.

The decision as to why a show makes it has to do with politics and money.

'All in the Family' took ten weeks to take off in 1971, and we were lucky to start in January, because if it had started in the regular fall season of 1970, I don't know if we would have lasted. The ratings didn't take off until the end of that fall season, when the other two networks ran out of fresh shows.

Last year, I was on Threat Matrix. We were on Thursday against Friends and Survivor; so this year it's fun to know people are watching, and to know that all of your hard work is not sort of wasted.

I knew on the day that I accepted my job at CNN that a ratings victory at 8 P.M. was going to be a formidable challenge. As I have been told over and over, this is the toughest time slot in cable news.

Honestly, I don't know enough about what's a good timeslot and what isn't. Either you have a timeslot where nobody is really tuning in, which isn't good, or you're in a good hour, and then you've got a lot of competition.

It's always bittersweet when you have a show that you own, that's against you. It's against one of our favorite comedies for NBC. And yes, that's part of the business model. House was on the Fox network for a number of years and was such a great business for the NBC-owned studio. That's part of what we're also trying to build. Hopefully, Mindy will help do that for us.