Dream of 4th TV Network Proves Elusive : 40 Years of Trying Has Met With Little Success

In the recent feast of corporate mergers involving media companies, three of those who have come to the table--media baron Rupert Murdoch, cable-TV entrepreneur Ted Turner and Chicago-based Tribune Co.--appear interested in what up to now has seemed a vain desire: launching a fourth television network.

In the first 40 years of television, at least three others have attempted to break into the network oligopoly, with little result.

But the success enjoyed recently by those syndicating independent first-run series, specials and even an occasional miniseries suggests that the new aspirants could have better luck.

The most memorable effort to launch a fourth network was the DuMont Television Network, begun in 1946 and half-owned by Paramount Pictures. In its nine years, DuMont competed with ABC for the distant No. 3 position with mostly low-budget quiz, variety and sports programs. Its most notable achievement was the live broadcast of the entire Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, in which the late Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.) investigated what he alleged was communist influence in the Army.

Never Made a Profit

But DuMont, laboring under the expense of connecting affiliates through costly transcontinental telephone lines, never turned a profit and went out of business in 1955.

For 11 nights in May, 1967, the short-lived United Network attempted to tie 127 affiliates and independents together with 13 advertisers for its nightly two-hour “Las Vegas Show.” That venture also collapsed, however, under the high cost of telephone hookup charges.

Over the years, others have flirted with the network game. Most notable was Metromedia, which took the base of the old DuMont stations and became the largest independent station group in the country. Metromedia, however, never became a major producer of television programs.

In all three cases, there were too few independent stations to support a fourth network, the cost of hooking up the stations was prohibitive, the advertising pool in TV was too small and many of those independent stations were UHF signal stations that were too weak to compete with the networks.

In the last 10 years, most of those problems have lessened: The number of independent stations has grown, satellite technology has made hookup cheaper and cable TV has improved the signal quality of many independent stations.

The rise of cable and the growth of independent stations also has increased the pressure on independents to produce their own programming. With more stations competing for programming, the cost of buying syndicated reruns began to increase dramatically.

Some independent programmers began thinking that they could produce a few new shows more cheaply than buying old ones--and it is out of this movement that the current reshuffling of the television industry has come.

The movement toward original independent programming gained impetus in 1976, when a number of station group executives attending a convention in Chicago conceived the first successful challenge to the networks’ grip on big-budget national programming--OPT: Operation Prime Time.

The idea was simple: Link stations with major studios, sell the advertising time and bypass the network middleman.

Operation Prime Time’s first effort, a six-hour miniseries called “Testimony of Two Men,” aired on 95 stations, nearly a third of them independents. OPT has since aired 25 big-budget specials, usually with a potential audience of more than 90% of TV households.

“Up to that point . . . all of the big-budget stuff was either done by the networks or wasn’t done at all,” said OPT co-founder Al Masini, president of Telerep, a firm that sells advertising on local stations. “You certainly can’t put a rerun of the network against the network and try to get a big rating.”

With the success of Operation Prime Time, Masini and others devised other financing schemes to offset the high cost of producing network-style programs.

One of the most promising has been so-called barter syndication, a system by which stations acquire new shows for next to nothing by trading advertising time to show producers. Barter is a variation on the way the three networks deal with their affiliates. Mixing barter and cash sales helped syndicators launch several series, including “Entertainment Tonight,” a daily show business news program that has what co-producer Paramount Television Group President Mel Harris calls a “networklet” of 159 stations.

Other first-run shows also have succeeded: Paramount’s “Solid Gold” popular music program, King World Productions’ “Wheel of Fortune” nightly game show and Tribune Entertainment’s “At the Movies,” a film review program. And when NBC canceled MGM’s “Fame” series in 1983, the studio kept making original episodes for local stations and foreign broadcasters.

The potential for first-run programming gained even more momentum this year when the rules governing television ownership were abandoned, causing a rush to buy stations.

The Federal Communications Commission gave the green light last December when it increased to 12 the number of television stations that any one individual or company could own. The previous limit was seven.

To some, the move suddenly improved the prospects of launching a fourth network. If one owned 10 or 12 stations already, the risk of trying to sell original programming to other independent stations seemed lessened.

And shortly after the FCC ruling, media companies entered some of the most feverish corporate maneuvering in television history--with even American Broadcasting Cos. engineering a friendly, preemptive merger with Capital Cities Communications, in part because it feared that it might be vulnerable to a takeover.