Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator instructions) And our first question is from the line of Lee Westerfield with BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Lee Westerfield – BMO Capital Markets
Thank you. Three questions if I may. Dunia, Dennis, first one will relate to retransmission fees and I want to ask two parts there. First, what still lies in store for 2009 and 2010, how complete are we, and are there escalators on your current agreements that we can look to, to build upon the base that you have set for 2008? The second question relates to political and Olympic advertising, which is always tricky for all of us to understand how much of that is incremental versus a substitute for otherwise saleable inventory especially given the downdraft in auto and maybe even retail too. So the question obviously here relates to how do we look into 2009? How do you think about 2009 in terms of a replacement of some of the political and Olympic dollars? And the third part, Dennis, if you can update us, I never thought I would be asking you, but truly your debt covenants I think stepped down to 5.0 times in 2009. And given where we are in the ad cycle I'm not seeing that yet as a threat but it is a something I have got at least one eye on. And so if you can talk about your debt covenants in 2009.
Dunia Shive
Lee, let me start with retrans. With respect to 2009, we do have one of our large cable providers that we are negotiating with now that expires at the end of the year, that is Charter. As you know, we completed Comcast earlier in the year and we completed Cox last year. Our Time Warner negotiations come up in 2010. With respect to our agreements, yes, most of them do contain some form of escalator for the out years.
On political and Olympics, it's a good question with respect to what you can call incremental, but I think it's important that I tell you with respect to Olympics at least for us, I don't see any of that as having been incremental this year. We did do $9.7 million in Olympics, but in a low demand environment, it's really more of a replacement of spot than incremental money. In other words, I would say that advertisers did not increase their budgets for Olympics; they just reallocated existing budgets to Olympics, which benefited NBC affiliates, and benefited ours, of course, but it made it harder for the others. We had 11 markets where we were up against the Olympics; we do have four NBC markets. So that to me was not incremental money particularly in this very soft advertising environment.
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