Some jobs are too big for one person, even if they are Oprah. I suspect she did/does not delegate enough of the creative control.
You are assuming that there is a rational entity in control of at least one channel. There is not. There are committees and hierarchies, which have been trained in aping whatever else is successful since they were grass-green interns. These people work in an environment where “success” means they successfully rode a trend up the charts and brought in more advertising dollars. Artistic vision and a desire to communicate meaningful information do not exist in the HQs of Discovery, History, et al.
If one channel had huge success with an orchestra of monkeys who could fart in tune, we’d have wall to wall monkey butts within a half-season.
“You and me baby, we ain’t nothing but mammals, so let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.”
Anyone remember that song? Considering what shows are on Discovery these days, that song sounds amusingly dated now.
You are not the customers of these networks. Their customers are their advertisers. Usually you don’t even pay any money to your cable provider that’s specifically intended for their network. You pay for a package of channels that happens to include that network, and the cable provider passes some of the money you pay them onto the network. All the network cares about is keeping their advertisers happy, since that’s where the bulk of their money comes from. As long as the advertisers like the number and demographic mix of the people that watch the channel, they will keep on advertising there.
The same is true of many magazines. I should know, because I seem to be their favorite subcriber. I constantly get offers of $8 for a year of a monthly magazine and $25 for a year of a weekly magazine. Various magazines have decided that I’m in the appropriate demographic for their advertisers, so they’re willing to give me cheap first-year subscriptions (and sometimes the same prices for their magazines indefinitely). The advertisers of those magazines are the customers of the publishers. I exist merely to keep those advertisers happy.
It’s a real show. The alleged exploits of the Amish Mafia are considerably less real.
Do you mean kidsdiscover.com? Or discovermagazine.com? Or discoverymagazine.com? I suspect not the latter.
The magazine. I have no exposure to their websites (but of the ones you listed, it’s kidsdiscover.com). I got the name wrong, but the image is one of the ones in my daughter’s collection.
Then again, perhaps it’s not related to the TV channel… and all this time, I thought it was. My bad.
At many of the magazines I worked at in the 1990s and early 2000’s, Wendell, we didn’t charge a damn thing for the subscription. Forced free trials that were endless was the name of the game. As long as we could tell advertisers, “We have 90% of the hotels getting out magazine” or whatever applied we were gold.
An old rule: “If someone gives you something, and doesn’t charge you for it, you’re not the customer…you’re the product.”
Note how well this applies to social media like Facebook and Twitter.
So … WE are the product of the Straight Dope?
Some product!
Oh God, don’t depress me by reminding me. When we first got cable in the late 80s, A&E showed classic MGM musicals, all the Woody Allen movies, cult flicks like “Swimming in Cambodia” and “Repo Man”, Blackadder and Monty Python, and scads of old history programs.
And to the poster mentioning Bravo, I remember watching a two hour documentary on Charles Mingus in 2002! Imagine any cable channel airing that today.
Hmm- according to this cable tv companies paid the various networks between $4.08 for ESPN to $0.01 for Blue Highways TV per month in 2009. And $0.58 for Fox News Channel :eek:, which I never watch, unless it is clips of FNC on The Daily Show. I don’t see any charges for the religious programming, thank God.
And yes, I can remember seeing ballet and opera on the original A & E 30 years ago.
I was SO excited to hear there was to be a Science Fiction cable channel.
Bleh.
Mrs. Plant watched that once. The guy had a Mercedes and lived in a $4,000 trailer with the wheels on. Less expensive to set on fire than a house.
There is hope for you.
PM me if this is a non-trivial line of thinking for you.
Does public funding have anything to do with it? When Romney was arguing to cut PBS funding, some pointed out that TLC used to be publicly funded, and it showed quality stuff. Now, it shows ‘Honey Boo Boo’.
Public funding does disconnect the advertising from program control, but it tends to be an uphill battle because (1) the channels can’t usually afford truly top-tier programming, and (2) the audiences remain miniscule, making it hard to justify the continuing expense.
I’m drawing on hazy memory, but I recall that some PBS stations calculated in the 80s that some programs cost them $50 a viewer to present - low-interest, high-cost stuff.
It’s not surprising that television is 100% ad-driven, merely dismaying.
You just hit on another good reason for a la carte.
Not much to add from me, but I was wondering when TLC is gonna tack on a “D” to their logo. They have been The Lowest Common Denominator, for quite some time…
Well I didn’t intend for half of my exorbitant satellite bill to go to sports programming either, but that’s exactly what happens according to some recent articles in the press. The truth is that a cable or satellite provider often has to pay a tiny sum to a network every time a subscriber turns to that channel. It might only be $.001 per event, but over tens of millions of subscribers every single day it mounts up. I used to work in the industry and specifically on the system which generated these payouts, but I don’t remember how the provider payments to networks like TLC and A&E compared to those remitted to the premium channels.
I look less down on Syfy(Scifi) than networks like The Learning Channel or Bravo.
Syfy still has science fiction and fantasy shows on the air. And they gave us Farscape, Battlestar, a lot of Stargate, as well as many others. First Wave, Warehouse 13, Alphas, and quite a few others, even recently.
I know they have wrestling and some ridiculous ghost shows, but they have decayed less and I am happy for their existence and would take them over nothing.