Peacock Staffers Are Sweating Bullets

(From ShopTalk)

Who's afraid of TV 2.0?

If you work at NBC UNIVERSAL, beware the ides of September.

Peacock staffers are sweating bullets over the impending release of what the company is calling TV 2.0, a proposed top-to-bottom reorganization of the network to streamline
it for the Internet age.

While NBC UNIVERSAL TELEVISION GROUP honcho
JEFF ZUCKER is pitching the project -- recommendations are due mid-month, according to one source -- as a visionary look to the future, staffers suspect it will be a merciless look at the bottom line.

"Everyone is waiting for the ax to fall," says an NBCer.
"There was a board meeting a couple of weeks ago, and the word was, 'How much can you cut for the fourth quarter?'"

"Zucker says we don't want to be like the music industry,"
says another staffer. Translation -- "They want to squeeze money out of this place."

And there's less and less money to go around.

NBC, which dropped from first place in the advertiser-friendly 18-to-49-year-old demographic in 2004 to dead last for the past two seasons, sold $1.7 billion in ads for its non-sports programming last May at the UPFRONTS, when advertisers place bets on the networks' new shows. That's a 10 percent drop from its 2005 take, and a whopping 41 percent drop from 2004, when hits like FRIENDS and THE APPRENTICE raked in $2.6 billion.

An NBC Universal executive, speaking on background, insisted that no decisions have been made -- "They're looking at a lot of different scenarios. Nothing has been decided yet."

Staffers at the network's news division are particularly on edge because news budgets are a large and easy target, and because JAY IRELAND, a former GENERAL ELECTRIC auditor and bean-counter at the company's plastics division who now runs NBC Universal's station division, is the executive tasked with wedging NBC NEWS into the TV 2.0 scheme.