I loved reading this interview with CBS Television head Les Moonves as it reveals a person who gets new media and how it impacts CBS. Why can't Viacom have this view?
CBS Chief Isn't Worried About YouTube or Google — 'As Long as We Get Paid'
Frank Rose 05.16.07 | 2:00 AM
CBS President Leslie Moonves
What happens to network television in the Internet age? As broadcasters confront ever-shrinking audiences and increasingly Net-savvy advertisers, that's a big question in certain quarters of New York and Los Angeles. With hits like CSI and Survivor, CBS president Leslie Moonves is the current ratings champ, but he knows Wall Street is ultimately going to judge him on how he manages the transition to the digital world. Moonves talked to Wired about user-generated video, tiny TVs, and how those clips of his wife made it onto the Internet.
Wired: Right now, traditional broadcasting accounts for the bulk of your viewership and income. Will that change?
Leslie Moonves: I think many years from now, people will still watch television, though it will probably be 150 inches wide. What will change is the ability to get CSI not only on TV but also on the Internet, even watching it in a foreign country as it's playing in the US.
Wired: Major advertisers, including Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble, are shifting money from network television to the Internet. How concerned are you?
Moonves: We're not. There are plenty of people who are willing to pay $2.6 million for 30 seconds on the Super Bowl and hundreds of thousands of dollars for American Idol. There will be advertising dollars on the Internet. We're there as well. We win either way.
Wired: How do you feel about Google trying to get into television advertising?
Moonves: Hard to say. Right now we like selling our own inventory.
Wired: Does user-generated video pose a threat to traditional television?
Moonves: Only when they're taking content without permission. Genuine user-generated content — like the guys from OK Go dancing on the treadmills, which I liked a lot — I don't think poses any threat. A lot of it is garbage; you know, your cousin Fanny sitting outside on a swing. But there's some great amateur stuff coming out. They don't have to steal the professional stuff.
Wired: Will professional television change in response?
Moonves: It already has. We have a bunch of people coming up with ideas for original shows that are very cheap, very experimental. There isn't a lot of advertising revenue on this, so you need young people who don't want a lot of money yet. They will later.
Wired: You were in talks with Fox and NBC to join their partnership to distribute programming on the Internet — the so-called YouTube Killer. Why did you decide not to?
Moonves: What was difficult for us was the idea of exclusivity. We would have had to funnel every piece of content through that mechanism. It didn't give us the freedom we wanted to make partnerships all over the place. We're so much in the infancy of the Internet; three years from now, this is going to seem like the dinosaur age. We've got to learn about users — how much they're using, why they're using it, when they're using it — and we have to connect with them. We think we can accomplish as much alone as they're doing together.
Wired: There's a lot of CBS material on YouTube. How does that work?
Moonves: You have to look at it in two different ways. One is content that you will get paid for directly, and the other is promotional content. Our attitude is, either pay us for it or give us promotional value that will eventually lead to our getting paid for it.
Wired: How do you tell the difference?
Moonves: If there's a one-minute clip of CSI, or user-generated clips like different shots of David Caruso taking off his glasses, that's great promotion. If they were showing a whole episode of CSI and we weren't getting paid, we'd object.
Wired: Do you have your own favorite YouTube video?
Moonves: My wife is the host of Big Brother. Her name is Julie Chen, and she'll say, "Da da da, but first we do this." So they mashed together her saying "but first" a couple dozen times. Literally. In different outfits. And when you cut it together like that, it appears very robotlike. They called her the Chenbot.
Wired: Recently, you made a deal with Verizon Wireless. Do you think mobile TV is going to work?
Moonves: We think wireless is going to grow tremendously. Do I think people are going to watch an episode of Survivor on a 2-inch television set? I doubt it. But I do think somebody's going to go to a grocery store in the middle of a football game and watch that game.
Wired: Of all these new distribution channels, what's the most valuable?
Moonves: They're all good. We don't care how you get our content — over the air, over cable, satellite, the Internet, or on your cell phone — as long as we get paid for it.
Contributing editor Frank Rose (frank_rose@wired.com) wrote about 2007 Rave Award winner Michael Wesch in issue 15.05.
