NO NBC SHAKE-UP SEEN IN TAKEOVER

Although NBC is getting a new owner with General Electric’s purchase of RCA, the new owner won’t get involved in the network’s operation, NBC Board Chairman Grant Tinker said Thursday. His news and entertainment chiefs echoed his view.

“I don’t think they’re going to fix something that ain’t broke,” said Tinker, under whose leadership once-struggling NBC has risen to first place in prime-time ratings this season. An NBC spokesman said the network expects to post record pretax profits of $320 million in 1985.

“I’m very positive about this,” he said of GE’s planned acquisition of RCA, which owns the Peacock Network. “I care very much about the NBC family, and if I felt this (the takeover) was negative in any way, I would have been jumping up and down about it.

“But I don’t feel that way,” he added in a phone interview from New York, where earlier Thursday he appeared at a GE-RCA press conference held to discuss details of GE’s $6.28-billion takeover. That move could be completed by the fall of 1986.

Although still third in daytime ratings, NBC ended last season in second place in prime-time ratings after nine seasons as third. Propelled by such hits as “The Cosby Show,” “Family Ties” and “Miami Vice,” it currently leads CBS, last season’s prime-time winner, in the nightly Nielsens, with ABC in third.

With RCA agreeing to its acquisition by GE, NBC became the last of the three major networks to be involved in takeover bids this year. ABC’s $3.5-billion takeover by Capital Cities Communications is expected to be completed by January.

Earlier this year, CBS Inc. successfully resisted a hostile takeover bid by cable-TV entrepreneur Ted Turner. But costs of its victory forced it to buy back 20% of its stock, sell some of its assets and order company-wide staff reductions.

Tinker said that one effect of the GE-RCA merger will be to add a sixth television station--KCNC, a GE-owned station in Denver--to the five already owned and operated by NBC in New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Washington and Los Angeles.

(NBC also owns eight radio stations: two each in New York, Chicago and San Francisco and one in Boston and Washington.)

KCNC-TV, an NBC affiliate, “is a station we had looked at long before all this,” Tinker said. “It’s a good station in a big, good market.”

As with the Capital Cities-ABC deal, Federal Communications Commission approval still is required for the transfer of any broadcast licenses. However, barring complications or objections by the Justice Department, transfer of NBC’s licenses could be accomplished quickly.

Last month, the FCC approved the Capital Cities-ABC license transfers in one day.

Many stock analysts say the reason the networks have been so eagerly eyed in recent months by outside companies is the FCC’s decision this year to increase from seven to 12 the number of TV stations a company can own, subject to certain restrictions.

A major restriction is that the combined audience for stations a company owns cannot exceed 25% of the nation’s home viewers. However, Tinker said that the addition of GE’s Denver station to the five NBC-owned TV stations probably won’t exceed that limit.

Although none of the networks’ annual reports specify earnings of their own TV stations, those stations are considered consistent major money-makers for the parent corporations. According to Television Digest, a respected industry newsletter, NBC’s five stations grossed $340 million in 1984, with $115 million of that in profit for NBC.

GE’s pending acquisition of NBC, rumored for several days, prompted inevitable questions Thursday about the effect of the takeover on NBC news and entertainment operations.

But, like Tinker, both NBC News President Larry Grossman and NBC Entertainment President Brandon Tartikoff said in telephone interviews that they believed that GE’s takeover, if and when it becames a reality, would have no effect on their operations.

Nor, Grossman said, will it have any effect on NBC’s proposal to enter the 24-hour cable-news market against Turner’s established Cable News Network.

“Not at all, as far as I’m concerned,” he added. “We’re still operating full bore on that. It’s essentially up to the cable industry now.” He meant that NBC now is waiting for commitments from the nation’s cable-TV operators on its proposed cable venture.

NBC has said it needs 13.5 million subscribers to start the new venture. It will decide Jan. 31 if it has that support. If it does, Grossman said, NBC’s cable-news operation will begin in July.

“Not really,” Tartikoff said when asked if GE’s takeover would affect NBC’s programming. “The only thing I can say,” he puckishly added, “is that if we get more good ideas and a bulb goes on over our heads, I’m sure it will be a GE soft light.”

Speaking seriously, he said that because of NBC’s resurgence in the ratings, “I’m pretty sure that they (GE officials) are not going to want to rock the boat, because the boat has sailed fairly smoothly for the last couple of seasons.”

He was asked if he plans to resurrect “General Electric Theater,” which aired on CBS from 1953 to 1962. For all but its first year the program was hosted by an actor now working in Washington--Ronald Reagan.

“Well,” Tartikoff said, “I hear the actor is not available until 1988. But we’ve been patient before and we can be patient again.”