ValueVision Shops the Olympics

Cable World, Sept 11, 2000 by Mike Reynolds

While American athletes will be stepping onto the medal stand at the Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia, in the weeks ahead, ValueVision will be among the winners in the years to come.

NBC Cable president David Zaslav says that with distribution commitments from MSOs tied to the five Olympics through 2008, the shopping network will pick up millions of homes by 2002.

"ValueVision is in some 36 million homes today," he says. "It will reach well into the 40s over the next couple of years. Operators see great opportunities with the network."

Zaslav says that through long-term deals, MSNBC and CNBC's coverage of the Olympics will be picked up by "about 98% of the multichannel universe."

He notes that while NBC did not pact with the National Cable Televison Cooperative, "most of the co-op's largest members did individual deals."

Although accords with Comcast and Cablevision Systems came in just under the wire, Zaslav says NBC was pleased with the timing of the negotiations.

"If anything, we were pleasantly surprised by the pace," he says. "We had a very complex set of business objectives in mind, centered around the value of the Olympics."

NBC was not only negotiating for carriage deals for the 279 hours of Olympics cable coverage, replete with a $1 annual per subscriber surcharge, but added distribution for ValueVision, CNBC2, MSNBC and CNBC; rate increases for the two established networks; retransmission consent for its owned stations; and agreements relative to its station's digital spectrum.

Relative to ratings, Zaslav would not specify any projections.