Americans are still willing to pay for cable TV, broadband and cinema tickets in spite of weak consumer spending, according to the first crop of third-quarter results from US media companies.

Among the media companies that have raised expectations for the second half of the year, Time Warner lifted its profit outlook for 2009 on the back of better-than-expected results at its cable and films division. Viacom on Tuesday reported a similar lift in earnings of 15 per cent in the third quarter from ticket sales of the GI Joe and Transformers films and its MTV Networks cable channels.