Media Overload? : Valkyries or vichyssoise? Baseball or building supplies? The ever-expanding universe of choices on cable has so fragmented the audience that nobody’s getting rich quick.

Cable TV is that sinister force that keeps broadcast TV executives pacing the floor at night. Even 40-something network chiefs can remember heady days when ABC, CBS and NBC commanded 90% of the audience. Today they are lucky to draw 60% of available TV watchers on a typical night.

“The cable services are like termites; they’ve been taking little bites out of the network infrastructure for years,” says Steve Grubbs, director of national television sales for the ad agency BBD&O.;

Cable is now viewed in an estimated 63% of the 96 million U.S. TV households, and its audience has grown consistently during the past five years, despite a concurrent increase in monthly fees. Viewership is up markedly for cable programming as a whole and for prime time in particular. Daytime viewing skyrocketed in 1995 for channels that doggedly followed the O.J. Simpson murder trial, notably CNN, Court TV and E! Entertainment Television. The children’s TV marketplace is now dominated by Nickelodeon, and ESPN earns respectable ratings for its coverage of NFL football and other mainstream sports.

You would think that cable executives would be rejoicing at all this good news. Yet they, like broadcasters, are wearing away floorboards in the middle of the night. The reasons for their shared malaise are diverse:

* While cable’s overall growth is steady--as more homes get wired (or get a satellite feed) and first-time subscribers sign up--the audience for many individual cable services is stable or even in decline. Pay channels have enjoyed only modest growth after years of flat subscriber-ship. The principal reason: The ever increasing number of cable program services--now more than 120--are stealing viewers not only from broadcasting but also from one another.

Thus, despite their collective decline in viewers, the Big Three networks attract far more viewers with their prime-time flops than do even the most popular cable shows. On any given night, such cable “success stories” as HBO, USA Network, ESPN, Nickelodeon and CNN are fortunate to attract 5% of the audience enjoyed by ABC, CBS or NBC.

“No one is going through the roof,” says Bob Maxwell, vice president of research for Home Box Office, the nation’s top-rated pay channel. “But there is ever greater distribution of cable viewing. In other words, more minnows are swimming among the whales.”

For the foreseeable future, then, broadcasting--not cable--is likely to remain the country’s most reliable mass medium.

* In general, the Big Three earn hefty profits. With some notable exceptions, cable services either break even or lose money. For most, advertising revenue isn’t enough to pay the bills. Fees paid by more than 60 million subscribers are vital to their existence. For example, E! Entertainment TV earns about 11 cents per subscriber each month, and CNN gets about 25 cents. For basic channels, these subscriber fees often represent the lion’s share of all revenues. Subscribers resist fee increases, and deregulation should bring greater competition--thus more pressure to keep fees low.

* Viewers seem to prefer network reruns to a lot of the original series produced for cable. This makes it difficult for a service to create its own identity. One indication of this phenomenon was Turner Entertainment’s record $105-million purchase in January of the rerun rights to NBC’s Thursday-night hit “ER,” which will probably be seen on Turner-owned cable channel TBS beginning in 1998. Turner paid double the then-record $600,000 per episode that the Fox-owned fX cable service spent to acquire reruns of the Fox network’s “The X-Files.” Lifetime recently bought the rights to “Chicago Hope” and “Homicide: Life on the Street.”

* Although audiences for ABC, CBS and NBC are in decline, viewers are not automatically abandoning broadcasting. They have been eager to support Fox and to sample the fledgling UPN and WB networks. On the nights they program, the upstart networks consistently outgun their cable competitors.

* But perhaps the most worrisome reality, for cable and broadcast executives alike, is that viewers are apparently willing, or able, to devote only a certain amount of time to TV watching, no matter how many choices they are offered.

“There are a finite number of viewing hours,” says Audrey Steele, vice president of New York-based Zenith Media Services, an advertising agency. “The number of homes using TV in prime time, for example, hasn’t changed significantly in five years. If anything, it’s dropped off somewhat.”

The average household’s TV is on about seven hours each day--a figure virtually unchanged during the past decade--and can typically receive 40 channels. As the nation’s cable systems are gradually rebuilt, average capacity could soon reach 100 or more channels. But that is likely to affect only what is watched, not how much is watched.

Indeed, Mike Feazel, senior editor of TV Digest, a Washington-based trade publication, points out that many would-be viewers are already turning to video entertainment of a very different sort.

“Millions of Americans log onto the Internet or an online computer service every night,” he says. “Others are watching CD-ROMs or playing video games. I’ll bet most of that time would otherwise be devoted to watching TV shows.”

In the first of what promises to be a continuing series of reports, Nielsen Media Research found in a recent random sampling of U.S. homes that there were video games in 43% of them and computers in 39%. Although the company didn’t assess directly the effect of such technologies on TV viewing, it estimated that 30 million homes use their computers at least three hours each week and 18 million use them six hours or more. Nielsen said video games are played for three hours or more each week in 11 million homes.

If the precise influence of cyberspace defections is still difficult to gauge, however, researchers’ assessment of broadcast-to-cable erosion is more graphic than ever.

According to estimates by the A.C. Nielsen Co., basic cable’s household ratings are up by about 19% this season compared to last, while pay cable ratings are up by roughly 14%. Meanwhile, the combined share of audience reached by ABC, CBS and NBC is down 12% from the 1994-95 season, to about 54% of prime-time viewing.

“The Simpson trial provided a significant boost, but [cable’s popularity] goes beyond O.J.,” says Larry Hyams, vice president and director of audience analysis for ABC. “The big growth in cable began in November 1994 and continued through July 1995. . . . The trend is also a result of network programming--it’s been a fairly disappointing season for new shows on all four major networks.”

Rejection of prime-time programming translates into big losses for broadcast TV. Viewers traditionally sample the networks during premiere weeks in September and early October. “If they don’t like what they see,” Hyams says, “they fragment away.”

“Fragment” being the key word. They all seem to go different places.

“There really isn’t any one particular alternative on cable that’s going up dramatically,” Hyams says. “It’s services going up a tenth of a rating point or so that really increases cable viewing.”

According to September-through-January national Nielsen ratings for 23 cable services, seven were up by 0.2 or more of a rating point over the previous year, 10 were virtually unchanged, and six were down by 0.1 or more of a rating point. (Each ratings point equals 959,000 homes.) The net result is only an incremental jump in ratings even for the fastest-growing services: Lifetime was up by 0.3, for instance, and Nickelodeon by 0.4.

Rick Feldman, general manager of KCOP-TV Channel 13, an affiliate of the fledgling United Paramount Network, cites Nielsen data suggesting that fewer than one-third (31.5%) of Los Angeles-area households watch the USA Network, cable’s top-rated service in the market, for more than 15 minutes during a typical week. In November, Nielsen estimated that USA averaged 4,426 homes in weeknight prime time, compared to KCOP’s 15,736 homes during the same time period.

“If I ran my TV station like that, I’d be out of a job the next day,” says Feldman, who believes cable receives far more attention from advertisers and the news media than its audience warrants.

For example, after Black Entertainment Television’s exclusive January interview with O.J. Simpson, it was widely reported that the program had earned a 6.9 rating among cable-equipped homes--roughly 10 times the size of BET’s average prime-time audience. But because the channel can be seen in fewer than half of U.S. TV households, its national Nielsen rating was less than a 3.2, or about 3 million homes--less than any prime-time program on ABC, CBS or NBC that week.

HBO’s Maxwell acknowledges that “basic cable services could not survive on advertising alone with their household reach as limited as it is.”

“They wind up reaching a lot of the same small group of viewers over and over again,” he says. “That’s why about 75% or 80% of their revenue is still coming from subscriptions. The broadcast networks don’t enjoy this advantage--they survive through advertising.”

But BBD&O; advertising executive Grubbs says cable has proved that even a small audience--if composed of viewers prized by advertisers--can be very profitable. MTV, Nickelodeon and ESPN, for instance, charge ad rates that are comparable (in terms of cost per thousand viewers) to the broadcast networks because teens, children and adult males, respectively, are easier to reach via these services than through most over-the-air programming.

As cable’s lifestyle-oriented programming slowly siphons off their audience, broadcasters have chosen to promote the few unchallenged strengths they can claim.

“We still have the ability to reach virtually 100% of American homes,” notes Ellen Agress, vice president of legal policy and planning for NBC, who serves on the board of A&E;, which is co-owned by the network and is one of cable’s best-performing services.

She insists that broadcast networks are still the primary venue for big-budget prime-time series and cites studies confirming that most TV watchers check the Big Three (or Four) immediately after turning on their sets, and only if they’ve found nothing compelling do they channel-surf among cable services. Research suggests that most viewers have only four or five favorite channels and another half-dozen they check out occasionally. The vast majority of options, it seems, are rarely (if ever) viewed.

But a sea change may be coming, advises Zenith Media analyst Steele: “Because programming choices are so specific to lifestyle on cable, and lifestyle is often determined by age, the younger generation may make cable their first choice as they grow older. The MTV viewer may become the Discovery Channel or the A&E; viewer. They may develop an ingrained habit of looking for a niche service. We may also see a generation that’s more fickle and changes channels more often, because they’ve grown up with the technology of the zapper and accept the choices of cable as a given.”

The latter possibility, like other headaches that have migrated from broadcasting, could plague the cable industry as well.

“You may see erosion of the strongest cable networks to other, smaller services,” says BBD&O;’s Grubbs. “Viewers of ESPN, for instance, may begin spending more time watching Prime Sports or the new Fox Sports/Liberty Media network. The fragmentation that everybody assumed would be at the expense of broadcast networks may also be at the expense of some of the larger cable channels.”

Broadcasting, meanwhile, may begin to look more like cable.

“You’ll see greater segmentation,” predicts HBO’s Maxwell. “The networks have always focused on 18- to 49-year-olds, particularly women. There will be a greater focus on more specific demographics because their survival lies in reaching a targeted type of audience. Being all things to all people will no longer work.”

Like other long-running wars, however, the seesaw ratings battle between cable and broadcasting may fade from significance before either side is declared a clear winner, as mergers and deregulation blur the media landscape. Three of the four largest broadcast networks--ABC, NBC and Fox--are already well on their way to becoming the Big Three of cable. In a world where the same people who own the Disney Channel also own parts of ESPN, Lifetime and A&E; and make Disney movies, TV shows and cartoons, in addition to running the ABC network and broadcast stations in every major city, does it really matter whether one division has more viewers than another division on any given night?

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Ratings Race

Taken as a whole, cable TV accounts for a big chunk of America’s viewing time, and as the first table below indicates, it’s getting bigger. But as the second table shows, ratings for individual cable channels are still small compared to those of broadcast stations.