For Broadcast October 11, 2007

What's the value of a runaway hit franchise?

Are you a CSI fan? You know the show: geeky-but-ruggedly handsome bug-loving hero William Petersen uncovers crucial forensic evidence every week to nail a killer. I became an even bigger fan when it was revealed this week that the three CSIs together are worth $2bn to the CBS network.

It is the biggest TV franchise ever, according to CBS chief executive Leslie Moonves. Last week, the eighth season of CSI Las Vegas opened as the number one network show in the US, even beating Grey's Anatomy. It just proves that the best TV can be worth the biggest amounts.

There are three CSIs - Vegas, Miami and New York - and the sales are huge. According to Moonves, CSI has the best repeat performance of any show ever, getting a staggering 80% of the audiences that the originals attract. The advertising CPMs are high and remain high in repeat, making it a 52-week money-maker.

You can't format it easily (Moonves says they talked about doing a French version but it just didn't work) but a primetime drama like this can be bigger than a reality series. Of course, people are out there trying to do the next CSI. One show with some buzz at Mipcom was Dirty Sexy Money, distributed by ABC/Disney and set to air on Channel 4.

In the US it has survived for two of the four weeks of good ratings required to keep its slot and have any hope of being recommissioned (85% of network shows fail this hurdle).

In this nail-biting time, exec producer Matt Gross has cleverly used the power of ABC/Disney sister brand ESPN to raise awareness (and he hopes audiences) for his show. ESPN will air a two-minute short with the actors from the show during a break on ESPN's flagship Monday night football.

The stakes for finding a hit are that high, and even the top execs sometimes get it wrong. Moonves admits that when he was first pitched Survivor, he thought it was a terrible idea. Luckily, he was overruled.

How do you stop fan-based piracy without turning on your fans?

TV programmes are meant to be popular. Broadcasters pray they will be, so that advertisers will come. But popularity has a downside - in the era of the internet, once a show has aired somewhere, it's on the web within hours (in the case of the US premiere of the new season of Prison Break, within 11 minutes), posted by a fan and available for free.

The US studios are starting to combat the problem by signing VoD deals with overseas broadcasters which don't usually get new series until six to 12 months after US broadcast.

In France, TF1 has a deal with NBC Universal that allows it to offer season two of Heroes on its VoD site 24 hours after shows air in the US. The episodes are available (with proper French subtitles) for € 2.99 each.

For TF1, the VoD offer is a way to combat piracy and still sate the appetite of the show's fanbase. It's all about protecting the value of the programme so that once it is broadcast on the TV channel, it will still attract an audience and advertisers.

These are also concerns for the studios because if their programmes are over-pirated, they will no longer be able to charge as high a licence fee to broadcasters such as TF1, which is why there was an increasing number of deals of this sort being done at Mipcom.

TF1 says that the first VoD offer of Heroes, although very successful in take-up, hasn't stopped piracy altogether. Unlike the music business, which took the unpopular step of suing its biggest fans for sharing (stealing) songs using the net, the TV business is trying to figure out how to roll with the punches the web delivers and stay in the game.