Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator Instructions) And we will take our first question from Marci Ryvicker, Wachovia.
Marci Ryvicker – Wachovia Securities
Thank you. Good morning. I have a couple of questions, the first on retrans. I guess is there anything specific that prompted the solution of the dispute with Time-Warner and does your full year digital rescue guidance include Time-Warner? Secondly, can you give us the net Olympic revenue for Q3? And then the last question is going from Q3 to Q4, there’s a pretty significant drop-off in core revenue, I don’t know if you can give us anymore color and I would assume and you can correct me if I’m wrong, that you have never had a revenue decline in the fourth quarter of an even numbered year before.
Vincent L. Sadusky
Sure thing, Marci, I’ll get started. I’ll try to remember all those questions. I may ask you to repeat the last couple of ones again but first of all with regard to Time-Warner, the bottom line is we received the compensation that we set out to receive from Time-Warner and there is not much more to say than that. It’s not been our philosophy to come off cable systems. It’s a bad result for the cable operators as they lose a significant amount of viewers when, in our case, our most highly rated television station in many of these markets comes off the air, it’s not good for us.
We lose temporarily advertising revenue but you can just read into when we do come off, it’s because we have not been able to receive the compensation that we’ve set out to receive. And, as we have said all along, we are not unreasonable in our compensation requests in that we’ve got the benefit of having a very significant data base of retransmission fees, having cut deals with every other significant paid television operator out there. This one was, as all of them have been, incredibly challenging but we are excited.
We are excited to put this behind us and now for several years have virtually 100% clarity into our retransmission fee projections, so we ended it because we received what we got and I will spare you all of the drama that went into getting to our final result but we got to the place where we wanted to be.
With regard to the forecast, yes, the projections for digital include our Time-Warner retransmission fee agreement. With regard to, I’ll skip Olympics and hand that over to Rich, just the only color comment on the Olympics is that we have a handful of NBC stations so we have a lot more stations that don’t receive Olympic revenue and actually are negatively impacted on a share basis by competing against NBC Olympic stations in August than we do stations that have Olympic revenue so when Rich gives you the number, the net impact of the company on the positive is not significant at all.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »




