5 ms·
The sad devolution of Discovery Channel
- DougN7 12y agoThis is nothing compared to the fall of TLC. It used to be called The Learning Channel!
- carsongross 12y agoWe now find ourselves with 999 channels of "Ow, my balls". Idiocracy was prophesy.
- ulfw 12y agoRemember when American TV news stations reported the news - and not opinion pieces?
- PublicEnemy111 12y agoI'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
- gramms 12y agoThere's a cynical startup lesson in here. 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. 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.
- jordan0day 12y agoIt seems to be really easy to make a new TV channel these days (relatively speaking, that is). It seems the Discovery Channel (or the very missed 'The Learning Channel'), used to be able to make ends meet in their old, educational formats. 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?
- pbreit 12y agoEasy to make a new TV channel? Uh, no. It might be easy to make a web channel. But you will hit an early brick wall in TV if you don't have millions (10s of millions?) of dollars just to get your channel available in a few homes.
- mikeash 12y agoMost TV is awful. Even the good channels are not great most of the time. 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 requires 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 mostly crap in the end. Throw in the need to interrupt the content every five minutes for tasteless, idiotic advertisements and you're really screwed. I anticipate a major boost in quality as content moves from the old broadcast TV format to on-demand delivery systems.
- EliRivers 12y agoEvery 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. (Opera on Ubuntu, which yesterday had no trouble dealing with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8172365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8172365 where other combinations were having trouble - welcome to the fragmented web; let us party like 'twas 1999)
- rbanffy 12y agoHow about "Ancient Aliens" on "History" Channel? Let's face it - the idiots are a better market.
- fidotron 12y agoIn the long distant past I did a stint in TV, dealing with people that sell commercial space during breaks. They could tell you how likely someone was to take out a loan suggested to them during an individual slot on an particular channel, and actively cultivated such audiences to increase revenues. At that point I decided to get out. It's been saddening to watch this approach spread out of the old media world and take over so much of the tech industry. (See also the Atlantic article on the front page now).
- buckbova 12y agoI don't consider myself an idiot, as I'm sure most idiots don't, but I've watched several episodes of that program. Yes, it's ridiculous but I was entertained. Those of us who recall the early days of the history channel remember the constant WWII programs. I think it's better now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_(TV_channel)#Criticism_and_evaluation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_(TV_channel)#Criticism... The channel to fall the farthest for me is TLC. It used to have actual things to "learn" as suggested by the name of The Learning Channel. It's dead to me. I guess they term this channel drift. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_drift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_drift
- bentcorner 12y agoI recall watching TLC in the mid-90's, and splitting my time between it and Discovery Channel. The whole push for "A [foo] Story" turned me away, and I guess things went downhill from there. Also, this is mind boggling: > The Weather Channel, for instance, faced severe backlash for its attempts to add movies to its lineup (already having drifted from all-forecast programming into reality shows for much of its lineup over the course of the previous decade) in 2010. I guess you could call this a "pivot", but if you've named yourself "The Weather Channel", I don't think you should be surprised if you get backlash because you decide to stop delivering what you said on the tin.
- incision 12y agoIn happier news, Cosmos (2014) is now on Netflix. What I really wonder about the devolution here is if/how the viewership has changed? 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. 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.
- click170 12y agoI used to enjoy Discovery Channel shows but lately I've all but lost interest in favor of BBC, ITV, Smithsonian, Al-Jazeera, and HBO for Last Week Tonight. PBS Frontline is still pretty good, but it seems like Discovery Channel, History, and Nat Geo seem like they're producing shows of lower and lower quality.
- taybin 12y agoRemember when MTV used to play videos?
- KhalPanda 12y agoIt still does. There's just no music in them. So yes, yes I do.