The details are from more precise reports:

Universal have bought the full rights for seven years. They have four years left to put a movie in the theaters or a mini-series on the air, or they lose their option to extend their ownership of the rights. The rights will revert to RJ's Succession again, which is what Harriet apparently doesn't hide much she wishes happens.

By Hollywood standards, that's a short time for a big VFX project for which they still have no script (according to the DM owner who read the latest version, it's terrible), and rumors are the movie is already shelved as a kind of potential John Carter - and that'd be a wise decision as it's exactly what it would turn out to be.

That's terribly short for them to turn around, rethink the project as a mini-series (even assuming they would consider this at Universal) and get broadcasters interested, then write and preproduce it and enter production, with broadcast starting almost a year later, typically for big minis.

As well say this project is dead, and no other project will start before 2016 at the earliest, which again would take 3-4 years minimum to develop into anything going into production.

In the meantime, trendier and much easier to manage candidates for TV/movie adaption of Fantasy will no doubt come out. GoT is a big success for HBO because it's HBO, but it's not the kind of success that attracts the big networks right now. Way too expensive, and beside HBO has developped this reputation for ultra solid series that make foreign broadcasters fight to buy them, which isn't much a reality anymore for the network shows that often gets sold at rebate or not at all these days. The odds of an adaptation of WOT in any foreseeable future are very, very bad.

Adapting WOT is a terrible idea anyway. The whole interest of the series is its detailed plot and massive cast, and the character interactions. Yes, it does attract a certain kind of readers, and it annoys the hell out of a whole lot of other Fantasy fans who expected something more traditionally epic and who've lost patience along the way. What they don't seem to understand though, if that any attempt to trim WOT down too significantly would result in a generic epic hero's journey that would be essentially an unholy mixture of a Tolkien and Arthurian rip-off.

WOT is like this huge Fantasy soap (aka Feuilleton, for the litterary counterpart and ancestor to TV soaps. Think Alexandre Dumas) set on an epic background. Of course, no TV soap would ever have the budget to adapt this, but it would be the right format for it (not with soap style writing and acting, of course). So basically, WOT is very much something for the written medium and audiovisual adaptations would totally denature it, unlike GOT, which is written much more like an historical drama, and which lended itself much better to shortening/adaptation. You cut the battles and big scenes from GOT for budget reasons, you still have a good, fairly theatrical drama, excellent for the miniseries format. You cut the epic stuff from WOT, you end up with a soap. You cut tons of secondary characters to keep it anywhere close to a manageable cast, you end up with a very bad soap.

Of course there are ways to condense the plot, but the problem is that WOT isn't that much about plot (which is an arch-typical good vs. evil story, its main originality is to have split the cental hero into an ensemble of them), its essence if far more in all that goes on around the plot, with the characters. That's all those little things that could interest some TV viewers (and annoy many others), but there's no way to make this truly manageable and still be WOT.. the series has over 2000 named characters, hundreds of them have been recurrent, dozens have done so more or less regularly and many fairly significant ones even skip many books. That would be a nightmare for TV. The core cast is huge, and they would have to rely on a massive rooster of recurrent guest stars, and the problems with guest stars are that very often, they're just not available when you want them. If you inflate some roles so they're there regularly through all seasons, you make the core cast even bigger, and you don't make the story shorter.. you end up adding subplots to a story that doesn't need any more.

I very much doubt an American network in the current state of the business would seriously consider an adventure like WOT. Yes, it might have some success, but it would be an expensive show, so financial success would be relative. And the thing is, the networks care only for money, and that's one of these complicated projects they never cared much for, and one of those for which the first season might make or break the show because it's one of those shows with weekly continuity, something the networks always hesitate a lot over and often end up dumping along the way, because it's very difficult to get new viewers further down the line. Typically, those series lose viewers each year, and you hope they'll retain enough to see it through the end of the story, otherwise bye-bye.

In the end, there's much, much easier shows to develop and manage that could make them the same money or more.

And for those with delusions HBO might eventually pick it up... WOT may be Fantasy, but it doesn't have the tone or aspects of the stories that interest HBO.

I like WOT a lot, as books, but the closest comparison to WOT that's been seen on TV is Little House on the Prairie. And yes, I'm serious.

Buy the characters, buy the world, change the timeline so it doesn't take place in the LB years and write episodic stories about Warders and AS and so on. That would still be closer to the tone of WOT than any attempt to reasonably adapt the series itself. Not that I wish this ever happens (and it won't, Jordan explicitely forbade this)