It is a year-end theme that's become as common as mistletoe: Cable gains audience while broadcast loses another chunk of share.
  And in that regard, it will be another milestone year.   
  Ad-supported cable will end 2003 with more than 50 percent of the primetime audience. That's according to an analysis of Nielsen Media Research data released last week by the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau. 
  So here's a good question: Where's the money?
   Even with their audience gains, the cable networks in total still see lower ad revenues than broadcast, and that's not going to change for some years, if ever.
   Why? The broadcast networks still have several huge advantages over cable, ones that may never change even as broadcast's share declines.
  One is its ability to deliver a comparatively large number of viewers in one shot, be it for a single event or a regular series. (See story 2, with chart.)
  That's not to say cable isn't making sizable revenue gains.
   Jack Myers of the Myers Report is projecting that the broadcast networks will end the year up 2.2 percent, to $16.3 billion, while cable TV networks will go up 7 percent, to $13.4 billion. 
  Myers is forecasting a 5.6 percent jump in spending on network TV in 2004 and a 9.6 percent increase on the cable networks.
  But the ad dollars are still weighted in favor of the networks.
  TNS Media Intelligence/CMR found that while network TV ad revenue grew only 0.4 percent through September this year, compared to cable TV’s 17 percent increase, the broadcasters still outpaced cable TV by nearly $5.6 billion.
  Using yet another measure, a Turner Research study shows that while cable TV accounts for 50 percent of the primetime audience, it only gets about 29 percent of ad revenue in that daypart.
  That's not going to change and the reason, beyond broadcast's ability to deliver large audiences, is simply marketplace economics: With its declining audiences, broadcast ad time gets more expensive. Fewer ads available means ad prices will go up, assuming a constant level of demand.
  With cable, a lot of its audience growth has come about with the rise of new, very targeted cable networks -- the Food Network being a classic example -- but those new networks at the same time have contributed to further expansion of the pool of ad inventory, which serves to keep overall prices down even as cable grabs a larger share of total ad dollars.
  This is so even as those niche channels pull away from broadcast the most desirable audiences.
  While audience figures in 2003 fell on the broadcast networks by 1.9 percent in the adult 18-24 demographic, 0.8 percent in the 25-34 demo and 4.8 percent in the 35-49 demo, cable TV’s audience grew 8.6 percent, 1.9 percent and 2.7 percent.
  Yet while all of this is happening, cable faces another problem, a decline in its share as direct broadcast satellite services continue to make inroads.
   That doesn’t impact the cable networks in terms of generating ratings or advertising revenue, because programming is available nationally through cable or DBS.
   But it does impact local cable TV services, which in many cases are losing subscribers to DBS.
  The penetration of alternate delivery systems (ADS), which consists almost entirely of DBS, went up to 18.2 percent in November from 16.5 percent the same month last year. Wired cable’s penetration dipped to 67.4 percent from 69.1 percent in the same time period.
   The TVB reports that DBS penetration has now surpassed 25 percent in 59 markets.