The upfront is finally breaking after a week-long stalemate, with negotiations over primetime ad time for the fall set to ramp up today. But by the looks of things, media buyers have come out of the standoff with the clear advantage, akin to their position several years ago during the depths of the ad recession.

The stalemate in the annual upfront broadcast market broke late yesterday afternoon when ABC backed down on its insistence that buyers pay for ads recorded and played back on digital video recorders, based on new Nielsen ratings.

Last year, ABC led the upfront as the first network to do deals, wrapping negotiations early and with minimal CPM increases. This year it instead chose to take a stand on the DVR issue, with the effect of delaying the upfront.

By holding firm with ABC on the DVR issue, refusing to pay for delayed viewing, media buyers are now able to set the pace and tone for negotiations with ABC and the other networks. This break comes after weeks of increasingly pessimistic reports as to how this upfront will do in terms of total spending versus last year, with some forecasters expecting network sales to be flat or down. The most recent forecasts peg prices a hair above last year’s and total spending down from $9.1 billion.

Late yesterday afternoon, ABC released a statement on DVRs that conceded defeat without saying so directly.

It read: “While the majority of the advertising community has reached a consensus on the Nielsen DVR ratings issue, and has concluded that commercials seen during a DVR-recorded programming have no value, the ABC Television Network continues to believe strongly in the worth of the ‘Live Plus’ viewer, and will continue its efforts to include this audience.”

ABC ad sales president Mike Shaw had insisted that the network would only negotiate based on live-plus-seven-day ratings, a new Nielsen figure that measures live viewing and viewing via DVR that takes place within a week. Buyers refused, insisting that the technology was too recent, launching in December, and that it is still unclear how many DVR viewers fast-forward through commercials. Their biggest beef is that the sample size is too small to produce reliable results.

The Big Four networks have all insisted that the DVR ratings have value, but ABC was really the public face of the fight.

CBS did not take a strong stance either way in public, nor did Fox, especially as it anticipated healthy CPM increases after a strong year.

And NBC was already saddled with a weak negotiating position based on this year’s fourth-place performance.

Their positions essentially sapped Shaw of any leverage he might have had, leading the only network to see gains over last year. According to some reports, ABC will give a CPM break to any buyers willing to negotiate on the live-plus-seven-day ratings, but it seems doubtful many will.

And even with deals now being made, the pace of this upfront is still expected to drag out. Both sides had been saying for weeks that they expected a very slow upfront.