Moonves ready to play hardball in Viacom split

"You want the NFL, you want `Survivor,' you want `CSI,' you want David Letterman--you're going to have to pay us what you pay USA [Network] for," Moonves warned them this week at the Merrill Lynch Media and Entertainment Conference in Pasadena, Calif. "We have considered it one of the great injustices for many years that we never got paid for our signal."

Cable TV networks like ESPN get paid per subscriber to be carried by cable and satellite outfits. The big broadcast networks don't.

Part of the reason for this is that the conglomerates that own broadcast networks also own basic cable channels and tend to use the over-the-air networks to leverage higher fees for the cable nets and/or to gain shelf space for additional channels.

The result, Moonves complained to the financial analysts, was that NBC-owned USA, for example, would get subscriber fees for rerunning old CBS programs. "And we weren't getting paid for the originals," he said. "There's something wrong with that."

But when Moonves' new CBS breaks away from Tom Freston's half of Viacom (which has MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1, Spike and others), he believes CBS will be able to take those concessions when the time comes in four or five years to negotiate new deals.

"That's part of our game plan," he said. "I don't know what we're going to get for sub fees or anything like that, but the future is bright."

Of course that assumes he's going to connect when he swings for the fences.

Moonves acknowledges that his part of the Viacom empire--which will include broadcast TV networks CBS and UPN, pay cable's Showtime, its radio division Infinity Broadcasting, outdoor advertising, theme parks and publishing--has been tagged as the slow-growth, value company compared to Freston's flashier half.

"But any of you who have dealt with me at all know that slow growth and me don't go hand in hand so well together," said Moonves, who expects to find additional revenue streams with minimal added costs.

Retransmission fees for CBS and UPN are just one way. Another is to use the capabilities of the new digital TV band to broadcast a CBS2, CBS3 and CBS4 where there only is one CBS channel now. He also sees potential in the Internet and cell phones.

"Technology's our friend. Our goal: Take the content and use it any way we can," Moonves said.

"While we may be called a slow-growth company," he said, "we won't settle for that."

And the ballgame hasn't even begun.

Age-old problem: Moonves told analysts he continues to be frustrated in his efforts to reinvent "The CBS Evening News" for a younger audience.

"We're trying to change it, make it more user-friendly, obviously to skew it a bit younger," he said. "We haven't come up with a great solution, so we've sent them back to the drawing board," he said. "But you will changes in the next few months."

Establishing a base for the rebuilding: To demonstrate its commitment to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as an ongoing story, on Thursday NBC News announced it is opening a New Orleans bureau out of local affiliate WDSU-TV.

Bulls to toot own horns? Heading into the last season of their pact with WMVP-AM 1000, the Bulls appear likely to produce their own radio broadcasts, sell their own ads and buy time on a local station rather than negotiate a rights deal, sources say.

Doctor, my eyes: Some people think they're seeing too much of Dr. Phil McGraw on the 5 p.m. WBBM-Ch. 2 newscast that follows his syndicated program on the CBS-owned station.

Nonsense.

Channel 2, which canceled its 4 p.m. newscast to make room for "Dr. Phil," should turn the whole half-hour afterward into "Dr. Phil: After the Show." Seriously. Why should Quick Draw McGraw have to share airtime with piffle about, you know, news?

It would have been great Wednesdayto hear Quick Draw discuss the bit he borrowed from Howard Stern in which he got women to plead on the air for breast augmentation surgery.

No way President Bush at the United Nations is as interesting as that.

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Phil Rosenthal's column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Friday.

philrosenthal@tribune.com