NBC wins battle with Boston affiliate

All is well in Leno-land — for the moment.

But that doesn't mean the skies have cleared. There are still dark, ominous clouds on the horizon.

You may recall that NBC and its affiliate in Boston nearly headed to divorce court over the issue of Jay Leno's prime-time show, which is scheduled to premiere in the fall. Concerned that Leno will provide a weak lead-in to its late-night news, WHDH announced that it wouldn't air the show at all.

Instead, it would air the first two hours of NBC's Monday-Friday prime-time lineup from 8-10 p.m. ET, then follow that with an hour of news from 10-11 p.m.

Not surprisingly, the folks at NBC were not pleased. They threatened to yank their affiliation away from WHDH. And NBC had a pretty strong hand to play because it already owns a Spanish-language Telemundo station in the market. And it would be a relatively simple thing to turn it into an English-language NBC station.

(Although that sort of tells you how much NBC values its Telemundo viewers. And NBC owns Telemundo.)

WHDH essentially surrendered last week.

"Upon further consideration, we have decided to telecast Jay Leno at 10 p.m. starting in September," station owner Ed Ansin said in a statement. "Jay is from Andover, where I went to school. I enjoy his humor. We hope the new show is a big success."

That's not a bad way to admit defeat. Say it has something to do with Leno being a local; ignore that you've just caved in to the network.

The fact remains that a lot of NBC affiliates across the country are more than a little worried about Leno's move to prime time. For exactly the same reason that WHDH was going to pre-empt the show.

Late-night local newscasts are hugely important to stations across the country. A lot of stations bring in more than half of their total revenues from just that single telecast.

And late-night newscast ratings are influenced by the programming that precedes them. If your network has popular shows in the last hour of prime time, it's good for your late-night news.

If not, it can do major damage to your news ratings and, thus, your bottom line.

Just last November, the folks at Utah's NBC affiliate, KSL, pointed to the network's ratings woes as an explanation for the closer-than-usual local ratings race.

(Ch. 5 edged out KUTV-Ch. 2, the local CBS affiliate. And CBS had a much better November sweeps than NBC.)