Network

Baltimore has drafted a skeleton proposal to bring wireless Internet to neighborhoods across the city and will ask communication companies and other experts this week to weigh in with their own ideas, the first step in creating a citywide network similar to the one proposed for Philadelphia, officials said yesterday. Mayor Martin O'Malley's administration expects to release a 16-page request for information to at least 20 companies to seek a broad range of proposals for bringing wireless Internet to Baltimore, said the city's technology advocate, Mario Armstrong.

If you think you have budget troubles, you ought to try balancing the books for the network news departments in the wake of the war.If NBC's war costs -- almost $45 million in expenses and lost ad revenues, the network says -- are similar to those of ABC and CBS, it means the trio has spent about $135 million covering the war.We don't know for sure, because only NBC is saying how much the coverage cost it, but it's unlikely that the numbers are very different...

WASHINGTON -- On the day more than a year ago that Bill Bradley officially entered the presidential race, a longtime aide worked her way down a phone list. It was time -- finally -- to mobilize the vast network of friends and acquaintances the former basketball great and Democratic senator had worked so hard to build. It was an Olympic-size list. "They were all people like me," says Roger Wilkins, a George Mason University professor and longtime Bradley friend who got a call that day. "People who, at one time or another, said: `I think you'd be terrific.

If the Baltimore Orioles and Comcast Corp. cannot work through their legal problems, a regional cable network - thought to be a boon for the club - could be more of a short-term bust, and many baseball fans in the Baltimore-Washington area could lose the opportunity to watch their home teams almost every night. Or, industry analysts say, the standoff could be no more than posturing between giants who realize it's in their mutual best interest to reach a deal. "Obviously, they're both losing money in the short term, but this isn't about losing, it's about winning," Roger Caplan, whose Howard County ad agency places commercials on local sports broadcasts, said yesterday.

An Oklahoma-based telecommunications company said yesterday that it will use Ciena Corp.'s equipment to build part of its North American network. The deal is worth tens of millions of dollars, according to the Tulsa, Okla., company, AFN Communications. AFN has 8,000 miles of network fiber in 13 Northeastern states, including Maryland. Of those, only 2,000 miles are "lit," or running. Through the deal announced yesterday, AFN will use Linthicum-based Ciena's telecommunications equipment to light some of the remaining miles of fiber.

Court TV and ESPN are teaming up in their coverage of the trial of Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis and plan to share expertise, talent and other resources, officials from the two networks announced yesterday, Court TV, a cable network that broadcasts live trials by day and crime stories in the evening, will use ESPN reporters and anchors to examine sports-related issues such as how developments might affect next season. ESPN, the network dedicated to sports, will use Court TV's talent to explore legal issues.

With labor troubles, a shrinking audience and no new hit shows in sight, network television is suffering one of its worst seasons ever. And the tough times show no signs of easing soon - bad news for viewers of the broadcasting giants. Signaling the sense of network urgency, NBC will break with tradition and announce today a new year-round lineup of programs. But so far, more attention is being paid to how the struggling network is overhauling the way it schedules new series and courts increasingly skittish advertisers than to the shows themselves.

Oprah Winfrey and Maryland-based Discovery Communications will team up to launch a cable channel next year that could eventually become the new home of The Oprah Winfrey Show. In announcing the deal yesterday, Winfrey was purposely vague about the kind of programs she planned for the channel that will reach 70 million homes. But she said it was possible that her long-running talk show could move to her new channel in 2011, when her syndication contract expires. If her show does move, the change will rock the world of daytime TV, where her program not only dominates all other talk shows but also drives viewers to early-evening newscasts on the broadcast channels that carry it. "Anything's possible," she said during a news conference yesterday.

PHILADELPHIA - When venture capitalists proposed plowing $10 million into his information technology firm, Bill Loftus decided he needed help vetting their proposal. "I needed to bring myself up to date on issues like what ownership shares venture capitalists were asking for now, what provisions they put in the contract to protect themselves, why they were asking for them," said Loftus, the owner of the Pennsylvania-based company Gestalt LLC. He decided that the best advisers would be other venture capitalists.

A strange pre-holiday ritual begins today. Each year, as the November sweeps ratings period wraps up, television's top executives begin - in a series of teleconference calls - spinning how each network is performing. This year, they'll be spinning faster than usual. For the first time in the 55-year history of prime-time television, no single new network series can be called a hit. Already - only two months into the season - some analysts are characterizing 2003-2004 as The Year of the Flop.