The year of the never-ending Upfront continues. The status so far shows a consensus among media buyers that this year's sales totals will be well below last year's numbers. That's largely because they took money out of the TV budget to feed online and other efforts. In some cases, such as NBC, that's led to some creative accounting. They've made more ad inventory available to make up for lower CPM numbers. ABC has finally woken up and is now about 30 percent done with its sales, even getting CPM bumps of about 3 to 4 percent over last year.

One issue that continues to elude people is how this money is being counted. Are the networks figuring money that is designated by buyers for online use, like when the network streams the show on their website, as "Television" or "Online?" No one's sure what column that money is going in. The parties that are really sweating right now are the cable networks and syndicators. They've had to wait until everyone finishes talking to the broadcast networks before they get to sit down with ad buyers. Those negotiations are not expected to be pretty for the cable networks.