Television Industry

Netflix, signaling its growing importance in television, will become Don Draper's second home. The home entertainment company has bought the reruns to the TV series "Mad Men," making its online streaming service the next place to watch episodes after the show's initial airing on cable network AMC. Netflix will pay "Mad Men" producer Lionsgate $750,000 to $900,000 per episode, according to people familiar with the situation. The first-of-its-kind deal means that reruns for the critically acclaimed program won't air on a broadcast or cable network, as typically is the case.

The pay television industry, under growing threat from the Internet, disclosed plans to prevent technology companies from luring away its customers. Cisco Systems Inc. showcased a new cable TV set-top box at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that would marry Web video with traditional TV programming. The device, unveiled Wednesday, would help cable operators maintain their lock on the living room amid mounting competition from companies whose devices or Internet-based services would allow consumers to "cut the cord" on their cable subscriptions in favor of watching TV online.

One weekly drama probes modern manhood in famously macho Mexico. Another show traipses through trendy Mexico City on the heels of not-quite-grown-up grown-ups fumbling with life and love. A third plunges underground, where strange experiments are taking place in the city's sewers. (It's a cop drama, no less.) If your idea of Mexican television is the sappy soap opera known as the telenovela , think again. Led by its public-television broadcaster, Mexico is producing a new breed of TV series ?

Last fall, Apple Inc.'s head of Internet services began making the Hollywood rounds with a proposal to launch a subscription television service that would offer a package of broadcast shows for $10 a month. The service was intended as a dazzling new entertainment feature to spark sales of Apple's soon-to-be-launched iPad. But the plan fizzled when several of the biggest studios rejected the concept out of hand. They also dismissed Apple's comeback pitch: to charge 99 cents per TV episode.

They are enemies, yet so much alike, media tycoons fiddling with empires and battling over market shares and airways. The edge, though, goes to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, owner of his country's largest TV corporation and head of a center-right government that regulates a network run by his voracious rival, Rupert Murdoch. The high-stakes tussle, which would make an enticing miniseries, is a saga of billionaires, pornography, technology, conflicted interests and the future of television in Italy and perhaps Europe.

When United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was foreign minister of South Korea from 2004 through 2006, he experienced directly how entertainment can shape popular perceptions, when not one but two TV networks began airing miniseries about the lives of Korean diplomats. Although the series romanticized diplomat life with requisite dashes of love and conflict, the net effect for the foreign ministry was a burnished public image. "Good storytelling is a very strong tool to change the attitudes and minds of people," Ban recalled in an interview.

Now that Simon Cowell has decided this will be his last season as a judge on Fox's "American Idol," the next drama for the show's creator, Simon Fuller, may be in a boardroom. Fuller, chief executive of 19 Entertainment, which produces "American Idol" for Fox, is eyeballing the top job at 19 Entertainment's parent company, CKX Inc., according to people close to the situation. CKX, headed by Robert F.X. Sillerman, also has a majority stake in Elvis Presley's Graceland mansion in Memphis, Tenn.

First there was digital television. Now comes mobile digital TV. Designed to let viewers watch TV on the go, mobile DTV is the network television industry's answer to a generation that's often more likely to watch YouTube on their iPhones than the TV in their living rooms. Since the first U.S. broadcast in 1928, TV signals largely have been limited to sets that sit still. This year, however, local stations across the country will begin transmitting a new type of signal that can be picked up by devices that travel, including laptops, smart phones, portable DVD players and mini-tablets -- all of which are to be showcased at the Consumer Electronics Show starting Thursday in Las Vegas.

CBS Corp. on Thursday tapped a veteran general manager, Steve Mauldin, to run its two Los Angeles stations: KCBS-TV Channel 2 and KCAL-TV Channel 9. Mauldin has worked in the industry for 32 years, most recently managing CBS' Dallas stations. Mauldin visited Los Angeles four years ago to learn how executives combined the operations of the two stations and replicated the model in Dallas, so he is familiar with his new turf in L.A. "We have a lot to work with here. Both television stations have a lot of talent and KCAL has a great brand," he said in an interview.