Area Teams Are Seeking Cable Homes

Many of the top executives in cable television gathered this week for the 25th Western Cable Show at the Anaheim Convention Center.

This is the place to be if you want to get wired into what’s new in cable and pay-cable television. The three-day convention ends today.

The big news in Los Angeles, at least in sports, is the closing of SportsChannel Los Angeles at the end of the month.

The question is, what’s next in cable for the Dodgers, Angels and Clippers?

The assumption--possibly the wrong assumption--is that Prime Ticket has the inside track.

“We’re talking to the Clippers, and we will be talking to the Dodgers and Angels,” said Roger Werner, Prime Ticket president. “But there’s nothing to report.”

The Clippers, however, announced Thursday that five games would be added to Channel 13’s schedule, including one at New York on Jan. 2 and another at Boston on Jan. 3.

But according to Andy Roeser, Clipper executive vice president, this does not close the door on any future deal, either with Prime Ticket or some other cable entity.

Brent Shyer, the Dodgers’ director of broadcasting, said: “To put it in baseball terminology, we’re still in the first inning. We’re talking to a lot of people to gain insight.”

Shyer said the Dodgers’ basic philosophy of being on pay-cable hasn’t changed.

“We’ve always been on a pay service, and that remains our priority,” he said. “But we’re listening to any and all options.”

Angel Vice President Tom Seeberg said: “We’re in a listening mode. We’ve already talked with one group and have a meeting scheduled with a second.”

Seeberg did not rule out putting the Angels on basic cable. But if history is any indication, the Angels figure to follow the Dodgers’ lead.

The creation of a new pay channel to carry the Dodgers and Angels is highly unlikely. SportsChannel’s failure sent up a red flag.

A more likely possibility would be to somehow put the baseball teams on an existing pay-per-view channel, mixing their games with movies and special events.

Indications are that regular-season baseball does not work on pay-cable.

Ed Frazier, the president of the Dallas-based Prime Network and a leader in the sports-cable business, said: “Baseball is profitable on basic (cable). It is not on pay.”

Frazier knows from experience. In 1983, when he was the president of Home Sports Entertainment, a Texas-based regional sports network that carried the Texas Rangers and Houston Astros on pay-per-view, his company paid only $14,000 a game for the rights, but lost so much money it almost folded in 1984.

“We were 15 minutes away from nonexistence,” Frazier said.

Now, Home Sports Entertainment is the country’s third-largest regional sports network, behind Prime Ticket and the Madison Square Garden Network, and is thriving.

Frazier said the resistance of some baseball owners to basic cable is a fear that, with more widespread television exposure, the live gate will suffer.

“We did a study on that,” Frazier said. “The additional exposure creates interest and actually has a positive effect on attendance. Of the people we questioned, 11% said they attend fewer games because of television exposure, but 22% said they attend more.”

Frazier said the main problem with sports on pay-cable is that its success is too dependent on how the teams fare.

When you put baseball on pay-cable, you’re gambling that the team will do well. Frazier, Prime Ticket’s Werner and other cable executives say that gamble is not worth taking.

Considering the recent performances of the Dodgers and Angels, that goes double in Southern California.

Prime Ticket is affiliated with the Prime Network but is a separate entity. Bill Daniels, the owner of Prime Ticket, is half owner of Affiliated Regional Communications, a company that owns Prime Network and either owns or is affiliated with 15 regional sports networks that reach 27 million homes nationwide.

Prime Network was created in 1989, and Frazier came over from Home Sports Entertainment to head the company, which also supplies programming throughout the world.

Frazier, 39, describing Prime Network’s function, said: “We are like CBS in that we are a national network that supplies programming to our affiliates. But there is a twist. CBS supplies primary programming. We supply supplemental programming.”

At Prime Ticket, the Lakers, the Kings, USC, UCLA and the nightly “Press Box” news show make up most of the primary programming. Prime Network helps fill in the gaps.

There will soon be more gaps. Prime Ticket, which recently went to 24 hours on weekends, plans to become a 24-hour service on weekdays as well sometime next year.

“That’s the next step,” Werner said.

Werner, 42, became president of Prime Ticket after John Severino’s recent retirement. The company, formed in 1985, experienced tremendous growth during Severino’s five-year reign and continues to grow under Werner, formerly president of ESPN.

The next major step at Prime Network is the formation of a sports information channel, to be called Prime Plus.

It will be launched Jan. 1 in segments on Prime Network affiliates, including Prime Ticket, and sometime in the future the plan is to have Prime Plus as a separate, 24-hour channel.

A similar channel, Sports News Network (SNN), was launched two years ago. It didn’t last a year.

“We won’t have the overhead SNN did, since we will be using our resources at our regional sports networks,” Frazier said.

TV-Radio Notes

Scott Kurnitt, president of Showtime Entertainment Television (SET), the pay-per-view arm of Showtime Entertainment, was among those in Anaheim this week. SET was the distributor of ABC’s pay-per-view college football, which was a moderate success at best. The buy rate was a minuscule 0.1%. By comparison, the recent Riddick Bowe-Evander Hollyfield fight had a 4.9% buy rate. But Kurnitt said all parties were pleased with the college football experiment. “People that bought it loved it, the schools were provided with additional money, the cable people liked it and the numbers went up as the season progressed,” he said. Was it a financial success? “We made a few bucks,” Kurnitt said.

Turner Broadcasting announced the formation of a new 15-20 person unit to oversee special events, such as the 1994 Winter Olympics at Lillehammer, Norway, and the 1994 Goodwill Games at St. Petersburg, Russia. It appears Turner is gearing up for a role in the 1996 Summer Olympics at Atlanta.

Saturday night’s Michigan-Duke basketball game, distributed by Raycom Productions and carried by Channel 5 at 6 p.m., is reminiscent of a game on Dec. 11, 1982, carried by then-WTBS and syndicated to 112 over-the-air stations throughout the country. It was Georgetown and Patrick Ewing against Virginia and Ralph Sampson. Virginia won, 68-63, and the game got an impressive 9.2 national rating.

College football’s major awards, other than the Heisman Trophy, will be presented during a one-hour Don Ohlmeyer-produced special on ABC Sunday at 2 p.m. Brent Musburger will serve as host. . . . San Bernardino all-sports station KMEN (1260) will carry this weekend’s Southern Section Division I playoff semifinals--La Puente Bishop Amat vs. Rialto Eisenhower tonight, Fontana vs. L.A. Loyola on Saturday.