CBS Interactive (NYSE: CBS) display ad sales rose 17 percent, reflecting the wider turnaround in advertising media companies have been enjoying this year, even as economic uncertainty persists. Although CBS itself didn’t have syndication boost it had from the sales of five major shows in Q309, which caused total revenues to slip a bit this time out, the overall strength of the market pushed network ad sales up 7 percent. Protecting those network dollars are paramount, said Les Moonves, CBS Corp.’s president and CEO, as he talked about degrees of openness to distributing the company’s TV content more widely across the web.
Asked if he tended toward a more “liberal” approach to syndicating CBS’ content, Moonves said CBS felt it was more appropriate to take a slightly more conservative tack when it comes to putting its content online, as opposed to some of its rivals. For example, he mentioned that CBS is still not a part of Hulu, which is backed by NBC Universal (NYSE: GE), News Corp (NSDQ: NWS). and Disney (NYSE: DIS).
He didn’t sound like he was in a rush to embrace a wider digital distribution model, for the simple reason that TV advertising still brings in “far more dollars than they do on digital.” As he has said on previous calls and forums, CBS is “exploring various platforms and will make a variety of deals when it makes sense.”
Moonves added: “And when it make sense to us is getting paid appropriately for our content. But TV Everywhere — we’re certainly believer in it. When Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) or Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) gives us decent retrans dollars, which they have done, and treated us very fairly, which they have done, they deserve to have the content as part of their retrans fees. So we’re very much in favor of TV Everywhere.” More details from call are available in the Seeking Alpha transcript (reg. req.)

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