To a large degree, the entire Killerbowl is an IBC subsidization. The network pays team owners, players and sideline patrols directly, and, indirectly, reimburses displacement village operators, officials, street keepers and the whole superstructure of trainers, coaches and statisticians that make up a professional football team. In spite of this huge expenditure, IBC stands to make an after-tax profit of a billion and a half dollars on the live presentation of this game alone. Plus IBC will retain full rights to all game tapes for a twenty-year period. Future showings will foster residual income of at least an equal amount. If considered as one lump sum, all the revenue to eventually be generated by Killerbowl XXI would be more than enough to place IBC well up on this year’s listing of the 500 most profitable companies in the United States.

All this money is seemingly inconsequential to IBC president Spencer. To him, the phenomenal revenues generated by the Killerbowl are purely tangential to the network’s real purpose for broadcasting the event. “Television is an entertainment medium,” says Spencer. “Football is entertainment. I put the two together the best way I know how. Granted, I make money at it, but that’s not my main motivation. I’m more interested in seeing to it that a lot of fine people take some enjoyment from what I’m doing for them.”

If that is his sole criterion for success, he will reach it admirably with Killerbowl XXI, when, according to the latest A. C. Nielsen surveys, fully seven eighths of the entire population of the United States will be tuned to his network.

(Reprinted from Business Review, the issue of Tuesday, December 21, 2010)

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Feathery quills of sunshine etch stark, angular patterns on the walls in TK’s apartment. Even though the glare distracts Sarah from her writing, because sunlight so injects her with the warmth of optimism, Sarah doesn’t opaque the windows to blank it out. Although, in moments of especially intense concentration, she does tote her vocowriter deep into the cloistered sanctity of a shadow.

She is at just such a point, absorbed in working out a particularly difficult passage, immersed in the intellectual mulch of blackness, when the vidphone buzzes. Straining to hold to her mental focus, she ignores the vidphone’s braying insistence, hoping the caller will give up and leave her to get on with her cerebral labor. The vidphone continues to buzz. Finally, her contemplation melts away under the heat of her caller’s persistence.

She answers the call. It’s Coach Carrerra. “Hey, Sarah,” he says with a strong twinge of disappointment. His voice is muffled at irregular intervals by the sound of airplanes taking off in the background. Clusters of people, many clutching luggage, pass in and out of view behind him. “Is T.K. there?”