Turner Classic Movie Channel.
Caveat: I enjoy classic movies. Go eat your popcorn and text your friends in the other theater.
I am aware that Ted Turner bought the MGM library years ago, and has presented us with umpteen movies from our collective past. I enjoy that when I get annoyed with modern movies.
But how do they make money from this? Do they offer their content for free to cable/satellite providers? Shirley they are charged something for the privilege.
The only “commercials” I see are for TCM-related promotions. Color me confused, but grateful that they are broadcast to us.
The cable companies pay most of the cable channels (other than the shopping channels). Haven’t you noticed whenever the cable companies want to increase rates they always talk about how much they have to pay for content?
Pay the man, Shirley. A favorite subject of mine. This is one of (the only one?) Turner’s gifts to America. Turner took a lot of heat back when he decided to try and make money from colorizing old films. The uproar over Casablanca being violated with colorization was relentless. He didn’t care, really. They were his films to play with and he did. But they didn’t make any money. The market spoke louder than the protesters. But he apparently really, really loved the movies. So he decided to restore movies on his own dime instead, and started TCM to show them. He must have other funding. I don’t have the information of how he set up this enterprise, or how it is funded, or even who does the lifting, but he’s doing more than anyone to save the legacy of American cinema. I don’t believe TCM makes a dime, but Turner has done something very important.
I remember the discourse over the colorization of old films, and granted those concerns were valid. However I am amazed at the restoration and clarity of the old prints brought back to life. Kudos to the technicians who make this possible.
However funded, I am grateful to watch cinematic history brought back to us.
Out of my 300 cable channels, which are mostly useless, I always tune into TCM.
Just wondering about how this is all possible.
When you pay your cable bill, TCM gets some of the money. With very little in the way of original programming, the overhead is much, much lower than that of other stations. Most of the films were in public domain when Turner acquired the libraries. I don’t know whether he can hold a copyright over his restored version, although I assume he can, so when you buy one some place other than from TCM’s website, you are probably buying something that owes royalties to Turner.
The restorations are amazing. I tried to watch the Irene Dunne version of Magnificent Obsession back in the 80s, and it was “foggy” in places, and scratched terribly, and the sound was so bad, one in four words was indecipherable. About 10 years ago, I saw Turner’s restoration, and it looked like a brand new print. It was beautiful. My brother is a CGI tech; he doesn’t do restoration work, but he knows how it’s done, and explained it to me. It’s a frame-by-frame process that takes months.
Those who do it are doing G-d’s work.
I think some of the restoration work is done with grants from places like the Kennedy Center and the American Film Institute. I don’t think Turner pays OOP for it all.
A few years ago, some questioners on the TCM website forum asked about the possibility of the channel converting to HD. They replied that since they were relatively inexpensive as cable channels go, they were kind of under the radar and did not want to risk losing their autonomy by asking for a larger budget. A year or two later they did convert to HD, but it was an interesting exchange.
No, the cable companies pay TCM a certain amount per customer. I can’t find an exact number, but this articleshows how much some other cable channels get paid. For example, CNN gets paid 60 cents for each cable subscriber, and TBS gets 62 cents.
(Remember, those numbers are based on the number of subscribers, not the number of people who actually watch.)
A lot of cable companies carry TCM along with the other Turner networks, so it’s getting millions of dollars in revenue while spending very little on programming.
You can buy their DVDs, though, and there has to be a way to play them in the UK. I can play UK DVDs on my computer with a dedicated drive (a drive reserved for doing nothing but play DVDs from the UK) set to PAL.
**TCM **is apparently priced cheap to the Cable providers and thus carried by pretty much every one. That is a lot of subscribers and their overhead is low. They get paid under a $1 per subscriber but that adds up to plenty of money as there are over 50 million cable/satellite subscribers in the US and TCM is in several other countries.
They make money selling DVDs, classic movie related posters and such and of course partnered up to sell wine. They are also connected to Fathom Events and their Festivals.
The on-air personalities are minimal and in house productions are pretty much existing footage and narration and thus cheap. The Film Restorations come from a variety of sources.
