Viacom today (Thursday) surprised analysts by posting a fourth-quarter loss of $18.4 billion after deciding to downgrade the value of its Infinity radio and billboard businesses. The units, which had been the primary bailiwick of former Viacom President and COO Mel Karmazin, had shown virtually no growth during the past year, and many analysts had predicted that they would continue to be battered by the rise of satellite radio and media buyers' growing interest in Internet advertising. "I didn't expect [the write down], but then again radio has been performing very poorly," Peter Mirsky, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co., told Bloomberg News. "Probably because they are going to sell it, they are taking the charge." Viacom had also been hit by several flops at its Paramount Film Studios, including The Stepford Wives and Alfie. On the other hand, Viacom's Cable networks, which include MTV, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central, reported a 9 percent rise in profits, while earnings from CBS, UPN, and its owned stations soared 22 percent.

Viacom's Paramount Home Video, which had been slow to enter the DVD market fearing piracy of its product, plans a big push into the market this year under Paramount's new chief, Brad Grey, the Wall Street Journal reported today (Thursday). Among its plans is to release a package of John Wayne movies from Wayne's production company Batjac. They include newly restored versions of the 1953 film Island in the Sky and 1954's The High and the Mighty, neither of which has been released on either VHS or DVD. The company also is planning to release Wayne's Hondo (1953) and McLintock! (1962) on DVD for the first time. PHV is also planning to sharply escalate the DVD release of classic TV shows in its library, including Happy Days, The Brady Bunch, The Beverly Hillbillies, Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place, the Journal reported, noting that while the studio released 35 TV DVDs in 2002, the number will jump to 220 this year.

Los Angeles Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik has chastised the news media for swallowing whole the recent claim by Universal Pictures that the classic porn movie Deep Throat is the most profitable movie ever made, grossing $600 million. (The claim was made in publicity for the recently released documentary, Inside Deep Throat.) Hiltzik points out that when it was originally released in 1972, it was banned in half the country and even in big cities was shown only in one theater, where the average ticket price was only $2.05 at the time. "For the movie to have made $600 million at the box office, in other words, it would have had to sell tickets to enough customers to populate the entire United States one and a half times over," Hiltzik observes. Referring to a New York Times report that suggested that the revenue came from video sales and rentals, Hiltzik points out that the first video players didn't even appear on the market until two years after the movie's release and that home video didn't achieve mass-market status until eight years later. The Deep Throat video has by now all but disappeared from the shelves of video stores, he further notes. Hiltzik then inquires: "Have our reporters, editors and critics become so mathematically ignorant that a patently inflated figure like this no longer leaps out and demands authentication? Or have they become so accustomed to hearing the unvarnished truth from Hollywood flacks that they no longer bother to vet what they're told before shoveling it into print?"

Blockbuster's decision to do away with late fees has resulted in many popular titles becoming unavailable in some of its stores, Home Media Retailing magazine reported Wednesday. In one instance, a reporter for the trade publication, after learning that the two films she wanted to rent were not available, was directed to the counter and told to inquire about renting one of the "coming soon" titles. She was then able to rent Exorcist: The Beginning, even though it is not officially due to be released until March 1. Apparently, the writer observed, "breaking street date is one way of keeping customers happy. I wonder how many other stores are doing it?"

The British film magazine Empire has named Mel Gibson's Braveheart the worst Best Picture Oscar winner, maintaining that writer Randall Wallace's dialogue for the film "has all the thudding subtlety of a parody." Runner-up was 2002's A Beautiful Mind, which was faulted for its "willfully dishonest screenplay." In third place was Cecil B. DeMille's 1952 "tawdry circus spectacle" The Greatest Show on Earth. The 1942 winner, How Green Was My Valley, apparently made the list primarily because it beat out Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon that year.

Besides hiring the services of the high-profile former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and former Associated Press chief Louis Boccardi to investigate 60 Minutes' now-discredited report about President Bush's National guard service, CBS hired a private detective to try to track down the source of the questioned documents that formed the basis for the report, the New York Observer reported today (Thursday). The investigator, Erik T. Rigler, a former FBI agent, was unable to do so, the Observer said, running into a dead end with Bill Burkett, the man who had provided the documents to the show's producer, Mary Mapes. CBS confirmed that it had hired Rigler, telling the publication: "To this day, the basic questions about the documents have not been answered, but we remain hopeful that, one day, they will be." The article indicated that while Rigler did not produce a report about the source of the memos, he did provide the network with a report about Mapes, much of it related to her personal life. Commented the Observer: "The fact that CBS had a private investigator looking into its own employee suggests that well before the panel issued any findings, network management had begun to shift its focus away from solving the mystery behind the documents and toward placing the blame for the decision to air the segment."

Chris Rock has been trying out material at comedy clubs that he is likely to use during his Oscar monologue on Sunday, including jibes at President Bush, L.A. Weekly columnist Nikki Finke reported. She said that a condition of Rock's acceptance of the offer to host the Oscars was that he be granted creative control over his material and agreed only to excise swear words. Rock, she observed, is keenly aware that he'll be blamed if the Oscar telecast fails to attract its usual massive audience, even though none of the films up for best picture has achieved blockbuster status. (The conservative group Concerned Women for America has already predicted that Rock's presence at the podium will drive away viewers and that it demonstrates "how far out of touch [Hollywood] is with the rest of America.")

Fox's American Idol continued to pull big ratings on Fox Tuesday and Wednesday, but CBS's CSI: Crime Scene Investigation pulled bigger ones, holding on to first-place during the second full week of the February sweeps. The return of CBS's Survivor also drew big numbers and pushed the competing Friends spin-off Joey to 40th place, its worst showing yet. ABC also had little luck on Thursday night with a new two-hour documentary, Michael Jackson's Secret World, hosted by Martin Bashir. The show was watched by 8.8 million viewers versus the 27 million who tuned into Bashir's Living With Michael Jackson two years ago. Meanwhile, Fox's telecast of the Daytona 500 on Sunday afternoon captured a 10.9 rating and a 23 share, tying a record set by the 2002 Daytona 500, which aired on NBC. The race, which averaged 18.7 million viewers, drew more than twice the ratings of the NBA All-Star Game on Sunday, which wound up with just 8.1 million.

The top ten shows of the week according to Nielsen Research: 1. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, CBS, 18.9/28; 2. American Idol (Tuesday), Fox, 15.5/24; 2. American Idol (Wednesday), Fox, 15.5/23; 4. Desperate Housewives, ABC, 14.7/22; 5. Without a Trace, CBS, 13.5/22; 6. Survivor: Palau, CBS, 13.3/21; 7. CSI: Miami, CBS, 12.6/20; 8. E.R., NBC, 11.9/19; 9. (tie) CBS Sunday Movie: Stone Cold, CBS, 11.2/17; 9. Everybody Loves Raymond, CBS, 11.2/17.

Quentin Tarantino will direct the season-finale of CBS's CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the Hollywood Reporter reported today (Thursday), citing the show's executive producer, Carol Mendelsohn. "He knows everything there is to know about CSI, and he is into the whole mythology of CSI, " Mendelsohn told the trade paper. "Quentin came in a couple of weeks ago. We had a story meeting with the writers. He had a great idea, and it was so much fun to have him in the room. ... We are positively giddy." Tarantino had previously directed only one other TV show -- an episode of E.R.in 1995, the year after he leaped into fame with the movie Pulp Fiction.

Shares in TiVo, the personal digital recorder manufacturer, rose 18 percent on Wednesday and an additional 9 percent in midday trading today (Thursday) on rumors that it was about to be acquired by Apple Computer. Shares in TiVo had fallen to a 52-week low of $3.45 on February 2, but have risen to $5.01 since. Although talk of a merger with Apple had been rife on the Internet for some time, a mention of the rumors by the cable channel CNBC on Wednesday appears to have touched off a flurry of buying. Stanford Financial Group analyst Frederick Moran told the Dow Jones News Service that new TiVo management may be more receptive to potential acquirers than their predecessors.