question: What year did TV channels such as the History Channel switch from regular scheduling format of one show per half hour to an hour over to a scheduling format that consists of playing a single show in blocks of time up to 10 to 12 hours per day? For example, today the History Channel has Swamp People for about 10 hours followed by Pawn Stars for 10 hours. I remember around a decade ago, the History Channel had 1/2 hour to 1 hour programs about history or historical people. The same for other channels.
rant: What year did they switch over to essentially 24 hour infomercial programming? Not that Pawn Stars is an informercial, but it may as well be since probably not too many people want to watch it for 10 hours straight.
Marathoning? I haven’t lived in Canada that long, but it seems the practice has really picked up in the last couple of years. I guess it’s a cheap way of filling time without having to order new programming—just use existing shows that everyone has seen umpteen times and won’t mind missing if they have other things to do on a weekend or holiday (or a holiday weekend).
Even just the mild version of this (~3 hours in a row) is just ruining cable TV for me. BBCAmerica is now a wasteland for large chunks of time. Kitchen and car crap on end. Don’t even bother to check what’s on it, so I don’t even notice a new show and try it out like I used to. (Coupling!)
It still does, I think - but this is a special case, where the same episode is repeated over and over. (I think ESPNews does the same thing with hour blocks overnight.)
In terms of airing a marathon of different episodes of a series, the earliest I can think of that any network did it on a somewhat regular basis was Nickelodeon, which would do it on Saturday afternoons starting about 15 or so years ago. (This doesn’t include isolated cases where, for example, a PBS station would air all of the episodes of a season of Red Dwarf in one night as part of a pledge drive.)
I think it started becoming widespread when “marathoning” became popular, which was only in the past couple of years.
There used to be decent and/or interesting programming on Bravo, then it went into the quarry with a bunch of other stuff. When C-Band effectively went dark, I said fuck it, now the TV is off most of the time.