The 21st of September marked the beginning of the 2009/2010 television season, the outlook is bright for ad-supported cable. The Cable Advertising Bureau (CAB) has released the Nielsen ratings for this season’s premiere week in a featured article on their web site, and the numbers speak for themselves.

At the end of premiere week 09/10 (September 21-27), Cable television earned an impressive 56% share of household (HH) viewing audiences—13.6 points above Broadcast Seven Affiliates, who came in with 42.5% of the household audience share. This season marks the lowest share for Broadcast during any premiere week in history.

Cable is at a distinct advantage this season, as Broadcast is showing a 77% returning program composition for its primetime lineups, while losing audiences across all age groups with the exception of viewers from 50-64. Cable, meanwhile, continues to offer new original programs across all its niche channels.

Even Broadcasts’ more popular offerings are experiencing decline according to Nielsen. Desperate Housewives fell a startling 34% from last year at the same time, with The Cleveland Show on FOX being the only new Broadcast offering to place in the top ten.

Will the ratings improve as the season goes on? While Broadcast’s results may be worrying some, cable advertisers have nowhere to go but up.

The 61st annual Emmy awards aired live from Los Angeles, September 20th, and cable television audiences saw their favorites called up to be honored over and over again. Some major names repeated success stories from the previous year, while others picked up their honors for the very first time.

A total of 103 categories were honored with the Emmy this year, 28 of which were announced last night. Another 75 categories received their recognition on September 12 during the Creative Arts Awards. In total, the biggest winning channels were HBO (16 Emmys), Showtime (5) and AMC (2).

AMC’s Mad Men won Best Drama for the second straight year. This in addition to Walter White’s honor for Outstanding Lead Actor in a drama series (Breaking Bad) earned AMC its two Emmys this year.

Other Emmy-award-winning cable faces included Glenn Close (Damages, FX); Toni Colette (United States of Tara, Showtime); Jessica Lange and Ken Howard (Grey Gardens, HBO) and Brendan Gleeson (Into the Storm, HBO).

Among 16 other awards, HBO took home Outstanding Made for Television Movie for Grey Gardens, which itself won 6 Emmys overall.

A complete listing of Emmy winners can be found at the official Emmy award website. Congratulations to all our favorites!

Tomorrow, September 1, will mark 20 days until the prestigious Emmy awards. This countdown of days is an exciting time for cable television viewers and advertisers alike, as cable came out on top of the nominations once again this year.

When the nominees for the Emmy awards were announced in mid-July, fans of cable television’s great variety of original programs were happy to see their favorites named across the board. With the exception of network TV’s 30 Rock, cable programs dominated most major nomination categories, with drama and comedy being the most impressive. Drama and comedy were widened this year with seven nominations available in each, and cable successfully filled the new spots with its popular niche programming.

AMC’s Mad Men was the star of the drama category, with nominations for best drama series, best actor and best actress among others. Mad Men saw 16 nominations total, which topped any other cable series in the running. Best drama also saw nominations given to FX’s Damages, HBO’s Big Love and Showtime’s Dexter.

Comedy also showed a record turnout for cable television. In addition to Showtime’s Weeds, HBO’s Entourage and CBS’ How I Met Your Mother, Fox’s Family Guy could make history with its nomination by being the first animated series to ever win an Emmy.

As for stations, HBO dominated the entire race with 99 total Emmy-nominated programs across the board. The nominations earned by other cable favorites can be found by visiting the comprehensive list available at TV Week.

Be sure to tune in on September 20th to view the winners!

TV executives across broadcast and cable television are saying that advertising sales for the 2009-2010 will be better than expected. Jeff Zucker CEO of NBC Universal Chief Executive Officer, which owns cable channels Bravo and USA, says that “We have bottomed out”, regarding losses in cable advertising.

Cable advertising is only expected to drop 3 percent this year to $20.9 billion whereas television advertising is expected to drop 10% this year to $12.8 billion.

With programming improving on cable television and audiences moving from network television to cable, cable advertising is posed to gain even more ground in the coming year.

Cable advertising offers a niche market that is geotargeted to best meet your customers. No other medium can highly target a particular audience segment with an engaging advertising like cable television. For small businesses, cable advertising is an affordable way to get the message out about your company.

Cable television is a great place for small businesses to geotarget their message to a niche, highly engaged audience. Now it seems businesses that are on web-based only are following suite.

A website called Lakeway.com has bought cable television ads on CNN, FoxNews and A&E to promote the website in Lakeway, Texas. The TV spots will consist of the core features of the Lakeway.com plus feature advertiser’s businesses in the spots. The goal is that not only with Lakeway.com will be promoted but the advertisers on the site will be promoted as well – creating a value added product for Lakeway.com advertisers.

Lakeway.com feels the advantages of cable advertising are local advertising that you can’t get on the Internet and relatively low CPM. Also, Lakeway feels it is meeting their client’s needs. Lakeway.com advertisers understand how cable advertising helps drive business and Lakeway.com is helping them get in front of their businesses.

Cable advertising not only benefits advertisers that have a brick-and-mortar location in a particular geography, but they also benefit websites that want to reach a particular audience in a particular region.