The outlook for the cable upfront was only so-so a few weeks ago but it’s looking downright grim now that the snail-paced network television ad market wrapped up last week down 2 percent from last year.

Media buyers had been saying for weeks that the $7 billion cable upfront was going to be soft and slow, with buyers noting that there aren’t nearly enough dollars in the market to soak up the burgeoning supply of cable networks and rating points.

This oversupply means buyers can take their time picking and choosing the best spots at favorable prices.

One buyer observes that while the cable upfront was essentially finished this time in 2005, this year’s upfront is only now getting started.

“Some of the bigger networks and cable groups are in the process of making deals, which is to be expected because the big ones tend to go first,” says Aaron Cohen, executive vice president and director of broadcast at Horizon Media.

“But nobody is surprised after the network marketplace that this is going to go on for much of the month of July. There is plenty of time at the moment to get a plan in, examine it, compare it to other offerings that are being made, negotiate it, and go through the normal process of going through the deal.”

The increasingly dim outlook for the cable upfront reflects the pace set in the network TV ad market.

Negotiations dragged on for weeks in the network upfront, where in the past advertisers often spent some $9 billion in a matter of days after the networks previewed upcoming shows to buyers in mid-May.

This year negotiations got off to a slow start in part because media buyers and sellers disagreed over how to use Nielsen Media Research’s new digital video recorder ratings.

But that was only part of the problem. The bigger issue was that many advertisers cut budgets while others shifted some money to new media like the internet, and others simply pulled out of the upfront after sensing there was no reason to rush in when supply is likely to be available later this year and prices may come down.

Total ad spending in the network upfront was $8.9 billion, down from nearly $9.1 billion last year.

Now the cable upfront is shaping up to be a disappointment.

Media analysts like Merrill Lynch’s Jessica Reif Cohen and forecasters such as Jack Myers of the Myers Media Business Report in recent weeks lowered projections for the cable upfront, from up roughly 7 percent to up only 2 percent or 3 percent.

Cohen now thinks advertisers will spend $7.31 billion in the cable upfront, slightly up from last year’s $7.1 billion, but lower than an earlier forecast of $7.46 billion.

Jan Hummel, director of national broadcast at MARC USA, says negotiators aren’t scrambling to wrap up cable deals because there is no need to.

“If you consider the number of hours that the average viewer watches and the number of outlets they view, and then when you couple that with other media like the internet, there is, with one exception, absolutely nothing that we must buy,” she says.

Michele Toller, senior national media manager at Empower MediaMarketing, says negotiations are slowly getting underway.

“[It] looks as though the cable upfront will move in a fashion similar to the network and syndication market, very slowly," she says. "Outside of highly competitive categories few deals have been closed."

Buyers have the upper hand in negotiations, which means the prices the networks charge and that buyers are willing to pay will on average probably be up in only low-single-digit percentages.

“I’ve seen some networks coming in at plus-5 percent, some are at plus-2, and some are flat,” says MARC’s Hummel. “That says to me that there is a lot of play in this.”