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By Steven Levy
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On the premise that less is more, Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone broke Viacom into two pieces last year. One was "the new Viacom," retaining cable gems like MTV and Comedy Central, and the Paramount movie studio. The other was CBS, consisting of the broadcast network, TV and radio stations, Paramount's television studio and properties like book publisher Simon & Schuster. So-called old media. But CEO Les Moonves, a former actor, has come out of the gate with digital-distribution deals (with Google and Comcast, as well as a plan to sell new "Survivor" episodes from the CBS Web site), an acquisition of cable net College Sports TV and the merger of his UPN TV network with the WB network. Moonves, at a CBS retreat in Florida, talked to us by phone about the future of his company--and the industry.
MOONVES : No question. Our game plan is twofold. One, to be the best what we call traditional media operations--network, television stations, radio stations, outdoor business. But, as we look into the bold new world of new media, we're trying to jump in in a big way. We are a first-rate content company, and we're looking at how to utilize that content in a hundred different ways.
Each deal is somewhat different, but they're based on the fact that more and more people want their content whenthey want it. They want to have the ability to look at an episode of "CSI" or "Survivor" whenever they want. We obviously picked two reality shows ["Survivor" and "The Amazing Race"], which people want to catch up on, as well as two procedural shows, "CSI" and "NCIS," primarily because these shows repeat extremely, extremely well. My guess is eventually you will see a majority of programming on all networks available in other ways. But we're putting our toe in the water before we dive in headfirst.
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We're talking to them. And I'm sure before too long we will be involved with them as well. They're looking for content--we're a content provider.
Not at all. There are still 30 million people every week that watch "CSI." The world is not going to change overnight.
We have to respect the [content] property owner and not get into a situation, like the music business did, where people were taking the properties for free. Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, said at our retreat this morning that the public doesn't want to steal product, as long as you make it available at a reasonable price. That's exactly what we did with our Google deal. We're making it available to [the public] at a reasonable price [$1.99], so their tendency will not be to try to take a property that doesn't belong to them.
That very well could happen. Google is a very forward-minded company, and we think they have a lot of good ideas on how to increase revenue for [us]. There's no reason why we won't be doing more with them in the future.
You know what? I have yet to see a full television show. I've certainly seen sports clips, and news clips, and clips of "CSI."
I don't think the network is a network without an evening newscast. It's our job to reinvigorate the franchise. The average age of the news viewer is a little bit old, and we want to make it a bit younger and make the news much more accessible.
I don't know. Some may call "60 Minutes" our flagship. I don't want to rank them.
Not usually. When it's something interesting, my people bring it to my attention. We are getting independent market research on how bloggers are treating some of our shows and personalities. Early on we knew "Ghost Whisperers" was going to be successful because Jennifer Love Hewitt had a lot of attention among bloggers. It would be silly to ignore blogs, and we don't.
The scariest headline? CBS CORP. DOESN'T PERFORM AS WELL AS EXPECTED. But I don't think that's going to happen. Put that in, too.
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