Sie had a better idea: “Let’s give cable operators a piece of the advertising action,” he proposed. “If operators tear up their old free-carriage deals and sign a new affiliation agreement that gives us a nickel per month—and if they commit to an aggressive rollout of Discovery to all their subscribers—then we’ll sell more advertising. We can set aside twenty percent of our advertising revenue into a ‘rebate pool’ that we can give back to our new ‘rebate affiliates’ as an incentive to do the new deal.”
