There's a cynical startup lesson in here.<p>Build a niche audience with quality and integrity. That leads to growth and eventually a strong brand. When you saturate your audience, shaft your early adopters for a broader, more streamlined appeal, but keep the branding.<p>The result is that every non-scientist watches Shark week and feels much smarter for it, the actual scientists shake their heads, and the network rakes in the bucks.
In happier news, Cosmos (2014) is now on Netflix.<p>What I really wonder about the devolution here is if/how the viewership has changed?<p>If people who are interested in the sort of material that Discovery used to show have simply moved on to learn and explore their curiosity elsewhere while the channel fattened up on insatiable reality TV consumers raised on network TV it would be sad.<p>If people who were interested in the sort of material that Discovery used to show have been gradually transformed into reality TV consumers it would be tragic.
It seems to be <i>really easy</i> to make a new TV channel these days (relatively speaking, that is). It seems the Discovery Channel (or the very missed 'The Learning Channel'), <i>used</i> to be able to make ends meet in their old, educational formats.<p>How hard would it be to build a new cable TV channel that looked more like the Discovery channel/The Learning Channel of the 90's? Is there just too much competition now (and too few viewers) for that to even be viable nowadays?
Every time I try to scroll down to read the words, the page flicks back up to the top. Web design is in serious danger of disappearing into its own precious cleverness.<p>(Opera on Ubuntu, which yesterday had no trouble dealing with <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8172365" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8172365</a> where other combinations were having trouble - welcome to the fragmented web; let us party like 'twas 1999)
I'm currently watching "10 things" on the History Channel. I have a strong feeling this show is an attempt to capitalize on the BuzzFeed model
Most TV is awful. Even the good channels are not great most of the time.<p>I blame the realtime broadcast format. It's not possible to produce enough high quality content to cover 24 hours a day. But you can't do too many repeats nor show too much old content, because a lot of viewers won't put up with it. Thus, the format basically <i>requires</i> you to shovel crap. You may be able to avoid it for a time, and you may be able to have some gems among the crap in the long term, but you're doomed to be <i>mostly</i> crap in the end.<p>Throw in the need to interrupt the content every five minutes for tasteless, idiotic advertisements and you're <i>really</i> screwed.<p>I anticipate a major boost in quality as content moves from the old broadcast TV format to on-demand delivery systems.