ABC Pushes to Get Affiliate Dollars for NFL Package

ABC sent a letter to its affiliates Friday demanding that they chip in for the expensive contract for “Monday Night Football” or face a series of harsher consequences, including the loss of lucrative advertising time.

The ultimatum, which probably will result in a tense meeting between ABC and its affiliates starting in Los Angeles on Monday, is the latest salvo in an industrywide battle by the networks to restructure the long-standing relationship with the stations that carry their programming to communities across the country.

ABC’s letter, which few affiliates had seen Friday, follows an unprecedented agreement by Fox’s affiliate board last week under which non-Fox-owned stations would pay the network as much as $60 million a year beginning in July for advertising time, some of which they had been receiving at no charge.

None of the networks but General Electric Co.’s NBC is making a profit--the result of declining viewership and rising costs for programming, particularly sports. ABC and NBC have sought to reduce the historic compensation fees they pay stations to carry their programming that amount to an estimated $200 million a year for each.

To squeeze more value from their investments, NBC, ABC and Fox also would like to repackage programming from the network for use on cable, threatening the exclusivity that affiliates have long enjoyed.

And all the networks have pressured their affiliates for help in paying for expensive series or sports packages such as the NFL. CBS and Fox affiliates each agreed last year to chip in about $50 million for football, leaving ABC as the only NFL broadcaster without financial support from its stations.

Under the latest proposal, ABC is demanding that non-network-owned stations pay about $50 million a year for football, up from the nearly $30 million it was asking before the last round of talks broke down in April.

The ABC affiliates have been the least cooperative of the groups, in part because the stations are some of the strongest in the industry--and have the most leverage. Many ABC affiliates are also frustrated by the severe drop from first place to third in key demographic ratings since Walt Disney Co. bought the network in 1996.

ABC affiliates have resisted paying for football, claiming that the network is not delivering anything new. “Monday Night Football” has been a fixture for more than a decade on ABC.

ABC has proposed giving affiliates a stake in a new soap opera cable channel that would repeat episodes in prime-time that air on broadcast network during the day. ABC announced that it was going ahead with the channel without the affiliates after the breakdown in talks, claiming that most affiliates contracts give stations exclusive rights only to news and prime-time programming, not to daytime programming.

Borrowing a strategy from News Corp.’s Fox, ABC also is threatening to take back an estimated $75 million to $100 million in advertising time from the stations. But ABC may have less latitude than Fox to take back ad time because of differences in its affiliate contracts.

The letter sent Friday, acknowledged by ABC in a statement, outlines other undisclosed measures that the network would take if stations do not contribute to football.