Last year’s upfront was enough to spook all the cable television networks. After years of stellar growth, spending in the annual spring TV ad market came in flat, making it the second-worst cable upfront in terms of percentage growth in history save the one following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Suddenly cable found itself beset by a passel of woes. Ratings and penetration growth had leveled off, and cable was no longer stealing viewers--and ad dollars--from the broadcast networks. And it had a new worry and a new competitor for ad dollars, the internet.

All that would seem to bode ill for this year’s upfront. Yet media analysts say cable TV is doing well and will see a healthy spending increase at this year’s upfront.

“It should be a better year than last year,” says David Joyce, an analyst with investment firm Miller Tabak & Co. “It’s possible this could be a year for mid-single-digit growth for the cable networks.”

Derek Baine, senior analyst at Kagan Research, expects cable spending to increase for the full year, although he notes the shift to year-round buying may dampen upfront spending some.

Why a better year? One reason is the sense that the economy is strong, and that sense is far surer than it was last year.

But analysts say this year will be without concerns that held back buyers in their spending last year.

“There was a lot of uncertainty about what the impact would be of social networking sites and the internet,” observes Baine. “What we saw, at the end of the day, is that they are growing but there have been a lot of high-quality programs on cable that are quite in demand.”

But perhaps a bigger issue last year was the controversy over Nielsen Media Research’s new delayed-viewing ratings, which rattled both buyers and sellers. Nielsen had begun rolling out three streams of data to reflect viewing of programs recorded on digital video recorders, live, live-plus-same-day and live-plus-seven-days. But there was little consensus over which should be used in negotiations.

The effect was to spook a number of advertisers, who then chose to hold back spending.

Nielsen has since promised to add new streams of data, and now the consensus is that the whole issue of delayed viewing will be put off until at least the next upfront as buyers and sellers become familiar with data.

“Last year was a unique marketplace in that there was a lot of discussion about the currency people were going to negotiate off of, so that slowed things down,” says Mark Miller, senior vice president of cable entertainment sales at NBC Universal. “You’re seeing some of the dollars that maybe weren’t invested in the upfront now coming back.”

But cable should do well at this spring’s upfront for yet other reasons.

Several networks have been rolling out highly rated programs like A&E’s “Sopranos” and TNT’s “The Closer” that have advertisers funneling more money to these networks.

And cable networks continue to be more demographically-targeted than most broadcast networks, which makes it an effective medium for advertisers chasing after specific demographic groups.

But perhaps the most encouraging sign for the cable TV networks, as NBC's Miller suggests, is the rising scatter market, where ad time not sold in the upfront is made available. A strong scatter market leading into the upfront is usually a good sign of building demand.

In fact, Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Rich Fine recently noted that momentum has been building since fourth quarter in the scatter market.

Mel Berning, executive vice president of advertising sales at A&E Television Networks, agrees, saying fourth quarter and first quarter have been the strongest quarters in the past two years.

“Given the challenges we had last upfront, and given some of the questions about the economy, the high price for energy, uncertainty of the war in the Mideast and the softening of the housing market, the ad market has been nothing short of spectacular in fourth and first quarter, which are really the first quarters that we’ve seen results for after last year, which everyone thought was a bellwether for our industry.”