Going into last week's upfront presentations to media buyers, it didn't look all that promising for the broadcast networks.

Buyers and analysts were predicting the networks would take a hit, and a big one, once negotiations opened for ad time for the upcoming TV season, with some thinking total sales could drop by as much as 20 percent.

Then a funny thing happened.

Buyers saw what shows the networks were scheduling for the fall. They were impressed, more so than in past years.

Now the thinking is that the broadcast networks won't take nearly such a bad hit in their negotiations with media buyers.

But how much less?

Just when the upfront market breaks will say a lot.

The sooner it breaks and the faster it moves, the better for the networks. It means buyers will be snapping up choice inventory and paying what the networks are asking. In a slow-breaking upfront, the advantage shifts to buyers, giving them the opportunity to haggle and beat down prices.

The upfront could break as early as this week, possibly even today, though that seems unlikely, with a lot of media people still out from the long break.

Or it could break next week.

"There’s no set timetable. I don’t know if it’s going to happen this week or a month from now,” says Andy Donchin, director of national broadcast at Carat.

Some work still has to be done after last week's presentations.

Says Donchin: "We’ll get our budgets, we’ll do our ratings estimates, and we’re still talking to the networks, but maybe with deeper discussions than we’ve been having.”

Aaron Cohen, chief media negotiating officer at Horizon Media, says his expectations are about the same.

“I think we’re going to be having conversations rather than negotiations. It’s like the first eight bars of the music will have begun,” he says.

“There is a need to evaluate [the programming] that was just put forward,” says Cohen. “It takes a little time for the big guys to absorb it into their systems for pre-evaluation.”

What has buyers impressed is that most of the networks rolled out well-thought-out strategies for next season.

NBC is concentrating on two primetime hours instead of three and airing fewer repeats. Fox is beefing up its historically lackluster fall with summer hit “So You Think You Can Dance.” ABC is overhauling its lineup with shows that impressed buyers. And CBS is taking advantage of NBC’s 10 p.m. time slot, which it gave to Jay Leno, by slotting in hit shows at 10 like “The Mentalist.”

Until last week, the assumption was that the entire upfront would be down modestly, perhaps by 5 percent, but that cable would actually come out decently, with much of the declines on the broadcast side.

But that could be changing, which would be signaled by negotiations taking off sooner rather than later.

Broadcast still has major advantages over cable, and one is a relative scarcity of ad inventory. There's always the worry that if it isn't snagged up, it will go to someone else. And broadcast still has the highest-rated programs on TV.

Broadcast also has perception on its side.

That's the long-lingering belief on the part of advertisers that when network TV is priced right, there’s no better place than high-profile, high-rated network shows to get products moving off of shelves.