TV industry in a golden age: Bruce Rosenblum

MUMBAI: The television industry was in a new golden age, said Warner Bros. Television Group president Bruce Rosenblum.

The best platform for launching a new show is broadcast television. "You want your comedies on CBS on Monday and your promos inside the highest-rated shows. The more we can draw people to broadcast TV the better it is for our studio business," said Rosenblum, while speaking at the television technology and trade event Nab in Las Vegas.

The TV business has never been better. "Revenue from international has improved dramatically. The domestic broadcast, cable and syndication businesses are at a high point and there are new buyers in the market like Netflix and Hulu that are boosting the value of their libraries and new productions," he said.

International markets are playing a key role in reducing deficits between the cost of producing shows and the licence fees paid by the networks. "Even in a global financial crisis, we have had five years of meaningful increases to the point where the revenue from international more than covers the production costs of our entire sales of 26 shows".

Rosenblum estimates that more than 85 per cent of Time Warner?s profitability comes from Turner, HBO and the studio?s TV Group. Warner Bros. gets roughly half of its profits from TV. "Anything we can do to preserve that ecosystem and keep the consumer in an authenticated environment helps us," he averred.

He also said that social media is playing a bigger role in marketing efforts. "I haven?t seen Facebook and Twitter having an impact yet on what gets selected. Where Facebook and Twitter can help is when you have shows that are on bubble. Several shows have gotten renewed because networks were aware of how much chatter was out there."