The Federal Communications Commission on Friday said it plans to fine the Walt Disney Co's ABC network $1.4 million for airing an episode of "NYPD Blue" in 2003 that showed a woman's nude buttocks.

The company said it opposes the fine and plans to appeal.

In a notice filed on Friday, the agency said 52 television ABC stations in the Central and Mountain time zones had aired the scene at 9 p.m. in violation of federal restrictions against broadcasting "obscene material" between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.

The agency said it received "numerous complaints" about the scene, in which a young boy walks in on a nude woman about to take a shower.

Stations in the Eastern and Pacific time zones were exempt because they broadcast the February 25, 2003, episode at 10 p.m. local time.

ABC - which unsuccessfully argued against the FCC's contention that buttocks are a "sexual organ" - has responded to the ruling by noting that NYPD Blue came with parental warnings, was V-chip-enabled, and because it had been on the air for a decade at the time, "the realistic nature of its storylines was well-known to the viewing public."

"ABC feels strongly that the FCC's finding is inconsistent with prior precedent," says the network in a statement, "and we intend to oppose the proposed fine."

"It's so early, I don't know what to make of them," FBC anchor Neil Cavuto said. "We're just coming out of the gate. Going in, I had so low expectations."

Cavuto said the numbers reminded him of 11 years ago, when he joined the then fledgling Fox News Channel. "For years after I left CNBC, it was as if I had entered the witness protection program," he said.

It took FNC several years to make a dent in the ratings and more than five years to beat CNN.

The FBC's audience peaks at 27,000 viewers at 8 p.m. weeknights, the data show. Another high point has been 2 p.m. weekdays, when 17,000 check in.

"I'm not a stranger to this sort of thing," Cavuto said. "I'm a realist. These things take time. It's tough to rate this kind of thing with an audience so small."

If this strike lasts longer than three months, an entire season of television will end this December. No dramas. No comedies. No "Daily Show." The strike will also prevent any pilots from being shot in the spring, so even if the strike is settled by then, you won't see any new shows until the following January. As in 2009. Both the guild and the studios we are negotiating with do agree on one thing: this situation would be brutal.

I will probably be dragged through the streets and burned in effigy if fans have to wait another year for "Lost" to come back. And who could blame them? Public sentiment may have swung toward the guild for now, but once the viewing audience has spent a month or so subsisting on "America's Next Hottest Cop" and "Celebrity Eating Contest," I have little doubt that the tide will turn against us. Which brings me to the second stage of grief: anger.

Ten hours of bargaining presided over by a federal mediator failed to close a deal before a strike deadline set last Friday by the Writers Guild of America, which has sought a greater share of DVD and Internet revenues for its members.

The initial impact of a strike for most of the public will be felt on television. Popular late-night talk shows such as NBC's "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" and CBS' "Late Show With David Letterman," which are produced on a day-to-day basis and depend on a steady supply of topical jokes and sketches, were expected to go into immediate reruns.

Prime-time comedies such as the CBS hit "Two and a Half Men" and Kelsey Grammer's new Fox sitcom "Back to You" also are expected to be knocked out of production because they depend on a substantial amount of last-minute script rewrites.

The effect on movies will be less obvious since the major studios' screenplay pipeline is well-stocked through 2008.

A strike would destabilize Southern California's signature industry and mark the first time in two decades that writers had walked off the job.

Thursday night's rally of more than 2,000 film and TV writers occurred a day after talks on a new three-year contract with their employers broke down amid disputes over DVD residuals and pay for shows distributed over the Internet.

The union's board of directors will formally ratify the strike plans at a meeting Friday at 10 a.m. at the guild's West Coast headquarters in the Fairfax district.

In fact, most teenagers and adults 30 and younger are not following the news closely at all, the report, titled "Young People and News," concluded. It is based on a national sample of 1,800 Americans that included teenagers, young adults aged 18 to 30 and older adults.

Thomas Patterson, a professor of government and the press at Harvard who conducted the survey, said that young people today do not make an appointment with news every day the way older adults do.

"We found that most young adults don't have an ingrained news habit," he said. "Most children today, when watching television, are not watching the same TV set that their parents are watching. So even if their parents are watching the news every day, the children are likely to be in another room watching something else and aren't acquiring the news habit."

The survey went a step further to see what the respondents meant when they said that they did pay attention to the news. Those results, especially among the younger groups, were equally discouraging for the news industry, said Alex S. Jones, the director of the Shorenstein Center.

Anderson Cooper has inked a new multiyear pact with CNN, according to sources inside the all news network. Under the terms of the new deal, the host of the CNN primetime show Anderson Cooper 360 can continue as an occasional contributor to 60 Minutes.

Although the network would not comment directly on the matter, CNN President Jon Klein said, "Anderson Cooper is an exceptional journalist, and his dedication in going after important stories wherever they occur makes him a natural fit for CNN. We look forward to more of his groundbreaking work in the years to come."

Cooper's previous contract with CNN was worth around $2 million a year, according to sources, and his new pay is more than double that amount. CNN has also made Cooper the center of an unprecedented multimillion-dollar promotional campaign.

Last December his newscast was up more than 30% in the key 25-54 news demo.

Smith and Wiley & Sons have plenty of potential content: There are more than 1,000 "Dummies" titles, with better than 150 million copies of the franchise in print.

"Whatever topic you can think of, there's a 'Dummies' book for it," Smith told Daily Variety. "There's such a plethora of information, and these are books -- not pamphlets."

Smith and Weed first began exploring the idea of a "Dummies" partnership several months ago. "We met with them at the Licensing Show in New York after Mark Itkin at William Morris set us up," he said.

Weed said he and Smith will try to create programming that emulates the tone of the book series. "Our goal is to bring relatable information to the small screen in a manner that will be both educational and entertaining at the same time," he said.

Deal with Wiley calls for A. Smith to work closely with the publisher to develop ideas. "We're not just licensing the name," Smith said.

"The way I look at it, almost every comedy show or satire show I see uses the same talking points against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney," Surnow said. "The other side hasn't been skewered in a fair and balanced way."

The working title of the show has been "This Just In," but that will change because AOL just launched a broadband comedy channel by that name.

The pilot segs will be co-anchored by comedians Kurt Long and Susan Yeagley and feature a family of correspondents. "There will be some elements of 'The Daily Show' and some of 'Weekend Update,'" Surnow said.

Surnow originally pitched the show to Fox Entertainment prexy Peter Liguori, who is searching for latenight programming for the Fox network. Liguori passed but connected Surnow with Roger Ailes, who in addition to Fox News Channel also runs Twentieth Century Television and the Fox stations group.

The owners of nine Fox television affiliates in the U.S. will not air a two-part special in which O.J. Simpson speaks about the killing of his ex-wife.

Lin Broadcasting and Pappas Broadcasting, both small chains with stations in small and mid-sized cities, say the program If I Did It, Here's How It Happened does not serve the public interest.

In the show, scheduled for broadcast Nov. 27 and 29, Simpson is to speak in "hypothetical terms" about how he would have committed the 1994 killing of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman "if he were the one responsible."

HBO executives have been hashing out the details of what they will offer online, and a spokesman says no formal decision has been made. But programming will almost certainly be offered via a subscription service, much like the mixture of HBO movies and original fare such as The Wire, Deadwood, and Big Love now offered by cable and satellite operators for a monthly fee of $10 to $12 or more.

There may also be features that let users download HBO programming to other devices. HBO now provides full-length episodes of programs such as Entourage and Sex and the City to customers of AT&T's Cingular Wireless for $4.99 a month, but this would be the channel's first move onto the Web.

Where a new HBO service gets sticky-and why it has taken so long to put together-is that a new broadband offering would put HBO into competition with the cable and satellite operators that now pay the bulk of the estimated $3.5 billion a year in revenues HBO generates. Those "affiliates" generally pay HBO around $6 a month for each of its nearly 30 million subscribers, according to cable industry analyst Kagan Research. The arrangement generated $863 million in cash flow last year.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told investors and news reporters on a conference call following news of the deal that YouTube will be "one of many investments" Google plans to make in the video field.

Schmidt said that Google will run YouTube as an independent company but also preserve its own Google Video as a separate operation. He described YouTube as the "clear winner in networking and the social side of video" for the way the site encourages its users to share videos with their friends.

The report predicts that the traditional TV set will be replaced by a number of "flexible viewing devices".

The development of ultra-thin displays will result in the introduction of video "wallpaper" and tiles that can turn an entire wall into a screen.

Other innovations expected in the next 20 years are video displays on breakfast cereal packets, and screens that can show two different programmes at the same time depending on the angle from which they are viewed.

Internet access will be available through connected displays embedded in magazine pages.

The new CBS Evening News With Katie Couric will be simulcast live on the Internet every evening, starting with its premiere Sept. 5. The move, announced this morning, makes CBS News the first of the network newscasts to use the Internet for simultaneous transmission of the news.

CBS, with the oldest viewership of all the networks, and with the lowest-rated evening news, hopes Couric will help lower the demographic; moving the news to the Internet would likely help overall. CBS News President Sean McManus, in a statement, called it "a groundbreaking development in making the program available to the largest possible audience." The simultaneous news streaming is one fruit borne out of the agreement that CBS hammered out with its affiliates in June to share the revenue from distributing content on digital platforms. CBS declines to give details on the deal’s terms, but stations will receive a cut of the revenue from such ad-supported streaming endeavors, including incentives for driving traffic to CBS’ Website.

For now, the affiliates will not be able to stream the Evening News themselves but rather link to CBS' main site, where the news will run.

Atom is one of the more popular—though perhaps under-the-radar—entertainment brands to have sprung up on the Web in recent years. Its properties claim a total of 17 million unique monthly users, according to officials. The company owns Shockwave.com, an online hub for a wide variety of free ad-supported games, ranging from classic puzzle and card games to action titles like 4 Wheel Fury. Sister site AddictingGames.com is also included in the deal.

In addition to gaming, Atom also runs both AtomFilms.com and AddictingClips.com, both outlets for short films and user-generated viral videos that generally appeal to a younger, MTV-like demographic.

"Atom Entertainment is a best-in-class and dynamic property, with brands that have dedicated, passionate followers and content that resonates with our global audience," said MTV Networks chairman and CEO Judy McGrath in a statement. "This acquisition is in line with our business strategy of being a leader in the digital space and connecting with consumers on every platform and device they use."

CBS is enlisting eggs in its scramble to attract viewers. The CBS logo and slogans promoting the TV network and its series will appear along with coded expiration dates on eggs sold by grocers - just another promotional measure in the competitive world of television.

More than 35 million eggs will be marked with phrases such as "CSI: Crack the Case on CBS" and "The Class, New Grade-A CBS Comedy" as part of a deal between the CBS Marketing Group and EggFusion, an egg-coding company.

The campaign will begin in September, when the fall TV season begins, CBS said Saturday at a meeting of the Television Critics Association.

What eggxactly is CBS thinking here? Apparently, CBS totally committed to its "Outernet Strategy" -- no Internet, Internets or Interweb advertising for them. So, what's next? iPod ads stamped onto oranges? Tiny MP3 players embedded in your Starbucks cup that feature Bono yelling "Uno, Dos, Tres, Catorce!!!"? Airborne holograms that follow us around screaming ads at us? The Outernet is clearly no longer safe.

The site has since agreed to start filtering copyright and obscene content and institute tougher security measures after talks with the Motion Picture Association of America, a group that represents Hollywood studios.

In May, Warner Bros. agreed to start selling its movies and shows using peer-to-peer technology developed by BitTorrent Inc., which has been used to trade pirated copies of movies.

Both deals are aimed at appealing to younger consumers who watch shows on computers or portable devices.

"Kids in the dorm rooms don't own TVs," said Tom McInerney, co-founder and chief executive of Guba. "They've got computers and that's their source of entertainment."

For the uninitiated, the expression "jump the shark" comes from the episode of the '70s sitcom "Happy Days" in which Fonzie, on water skis, actually jumped over a shark. Fans believe the episode signaled creative bankruptcy on the part of the writers as well as the beginning of the end for the show.

On the Web site, TV fans debate whether various shows have "jumped the shark" and, if so, when.

For instance, the majority of participants believe the long-running prime-time soap "Dallas" jumped the shark when Bobby Ewing showed up in Pam's shower, meaning that his death -- and the entire 1985-86 season -- had been Pam's dream. You can see their point.

The majority of site fans also believe the 1980s ABC comedy "Moonlighting" jumped the shark when Maddie and David -- Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis -- had sex for the first time. Again, hard to argue.

The service will begin sometime this summer, with prices beginning at about $1 for some television programs and increasing to about the price of a DVD or video rental for full-length movies.

The initial offerings will include movies like "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," "Rumor Has It" and "Natural Born Killers." The television shows will include older fare like "The Dukes of Hazzard" and "Babylon 5."

To use the service, consumers will visit www.bittorrent.com, download the software and then browse the selections on the Web site. They will be prevented from copying and distributing files they purchase through two mechanisms: one that requires them to enter a password before watching a file, and another that allows the file to be viewed only on the computer to which it was downloaded.

Online piracy has become increasingly vexing for Hollywood studio executives as faster Internet connections have made it easier to copy large movie files. A study commissioned by the Motion Picture Association of America concluded that piracy cost the studios about $2.3 billion in revenue in 2005.

Seventy-two percent of all respondents said they followed the news closely, including 67 percent of those 18 to 24 years old.

Asked to name the news source they most trusted, without any prompting, 59 percent of Egyptians said Al Jazeera, 52 percent of Brazilians said Rede Globo, 32 percent of Britons said the BBC, 22 percent of Germans said ARD and 11 percent of Americans said Fox News, each leading their respective nations.

The most trusted news brands globally were the BBC, Britain's publicly funded broadcaster, and CNN, which is owned by the world's biggest media conglomerate, Time Warner Inc..

Three Internet portals -- Google, Yahoo and Microsoft/MSN -- received the next highest trust ratings across the 10 countries, when respondents were prompted with 16 different brand names.

Although trust in media has grown in most countries over the past four years, the survey found, 28 percent of people across the 10 countries either strongly agreed or somewhat agreed with the statement: "In the past year I have stopped using a specific media source because it lost my trust."

Advertising revenue will support the trial run on ABC.com, with advertisers AT&T, Ford, Procter & Gamble and Universal Pictures already signed up.

"Commander in Chief" and "Alias" along with "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" will be available on the Web in May and June, starting the day after they are first broadcast.

Viewers will be able to pause and move between "chapters" in an episode but will not be able to skip ads that are technically embedded.

Disney is also launching a high-speed Internet channel for soap opera fans, called Soapnetic, on April 17 for subscribers to Verizon Communications' Internet services.

The new ESPNU.com, which will go head to head with CSTV.com, College Sports Television's companion Web site, will debut on August 28, the same day the network's new daily series SportsCenterU launches. The site will feature expanded coverage of several college sports, including ice hockey, soccer, baseball and volleyball, said officials, who are hoping to build upon the network's growing reputation as a comprehensive outlet for college athletics.

"ESPNU.com will allow us to expand upon that and increase the depth of our coverage of other collegiate sports, establishing a more complete destination for college sports fans within ESPN.com," said John Kosner, ESPN New Media's senior vp and general manager.

Amazon.com is in talks with three Hollywood studios about starting a service that would allow consumers to download movies and TV shows for a fee and burn them onto DVD's, according to three people briefed on the discussions.

If the advanced negotiations are successfully concluded, Amazon's service would position itself in the media world alongside rivals like Apple Computer's iTunes as a place where people go not just to order goods to be sent by mail, but to instantly enjoy digital wares as well.

So far, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios and Warner Brothers are engaged in the talks, said one person close to the talks who, like the others, asked not to be identified because the negotiations are continuing.

Although it is not clear when it might begin, an Amazon downloading service would be sure to send waves through both the media and retail worlds. Players in both industries are racing to offer new ways to give technology-savvy audiences instant access to their favorite shows and songs, in a field crowded with potential rivals using Internet and on-demand technologies.

The expansion of AOL's video service, which will combine free and pay-per-download shows from established programmers and user-created video clips, aims to address complaints about the rigid pricing structure and the mix of available programing on iTunes.

It also puts the Dulles, Virginia unit in competition with Yahoo Inc., which this week said it planned to scale back on creating original programing, and Google Inc..

The service will sell Time Warner-owned shows and those created by other programmers and networks, the company said, declining to name partners.

"We've been in discussion for months with every major cable and broadcast network," Kevin Conroy, executive vice president of AOL Media Networks told Reuters.

"Conviction" is trying to do for legal dramas what ABC's "Grey's Anatomy" has done for medical shows, sucking viewers into the lives of interns in a Seattle hospital.

"Grey's" has done it remarkably well, catapulting to a spot among the top five most-watched shows on television in its second season.

"Conviction" aims to pull us in through the inevitable calamities that befall a bunch of inexperienced assistant district attorneys in New York.

We see life in a bureau of the New York district attorney's office through the eyes of various newbies, all of whom are hot and on the verge of hooking up on a moment's notice.

The New York-based owners of the CBS television network and radio stations group already offers its top rated shows including CSI: Crime Scene Investigation on Google Inc. video service for $1.99 and on Comcast Corp.'s on-demand system for 99 cents.

Its latest plans now cuts out the distributor. The company said it plans to share an undisclosed portion of the revenue with broadcast affiliate stations, as it has done with other new media deals.

"It's been our strategy to exploit content across as many platforms as possible," Leslie Moonves, chief executive of CBS, said in a statement.

Respondents to a U.S. consumer survey said they spend 14 hours a week on line, which is the same amount of time in front of a television, JupiterResearch said.

"Even the most intensive users of newspapers and magazines spend less time reading these publications than they do online or watching TV," JupiterResearch analyst Barry Parr said in a statement. "TV and newspaper companies risk losing an entire generation of users unless they immediately start promoting their online products,"

The Internet is displacing the use of other media, such as radio, magazines and books. The latter is suffering the most, with 37 percent of all online people reporting that they spend less time reading books because of their online activities.

Zucker, who was previously president of NBC Universal television networks, will now head an expanded television group that combines programming, the stations group, operations, and sales into one unit. He will report to NBC Universal CEO Bob Wright.