It’s now just been reported that Chris Wallace is leaving CNN to “explore podcasting”. With the recent new CNN is firing hundreds of employees after going from 13.3 million average viewers in 2016 to… 800k in 2024. Comcast is looking to ditch their dumpster fire MSNBC, CNBC, Oxygen, Sci-Fi, and Bravo networks because they’re probably putting out the same or worse decline as cnn. Peacock, NBCs streaming service has yet to turn a profit. And the icing on the cake? “According to Forbes, there were only three cable networks in 2023 with an average audience above one million viewers, down from five the previous year and down from 19 in 2013.” They’re dying on the vine, their streaming services can’t make money, and they are too useless to even keep around as propaganda rags. With the potential death of the first AAA game publisher on the horizon (Ubisoft) we are seeing largest consequences of “get woke go broke” in our lifetimes.
Update: The Guardian is no longer posting on X, Don Lemon is leaving X, expect more to follow suit. This is just hilarious.
Edit 2: numbers reflect an average from last Wednesday to Friday. That marks a 54% decrease in the network's viewership average in the month of October (1.765 million viewers) as well as a 51% decrease in the network's year-to-date 2024 average (1.655 million viewers). Additionally, on Friday MSNBC saw 636,000 viewers and 61,000 in the demo, making it the network's lowest rated non-holiday night of the year.
I’m still mad about what they turned the sci-fi channel into. That channel debuted when I was 11 and I loved it. They knew their audience and catered to it. As for the news agencies that is no surprise since they are basically Democrat shills so you know what they will say.
You mean the Sy-Fy channel. Because it needed to add dogshit fantasy shows to appeal to women.
Someone should tweet at Elon he should buy SyFy and rebrand it back to SciFi and make good SciFi shows and movies again. It has a good back catalogue I'd imagine so you could roll it into a dedicated SciFi series. I think this would be important because it would help inspire the younger generation with good SciFi stories that aren't fantasy based nonsense. Elon has said we need more engineers and cultural propaganda is important in the creation of them.
Turn TLC back into The Learning Channel. Make The History Channel about actual history, no more Curse of Oak Island and American Pickers. Have Discovery make any show that's not about mining gold or hunting ghosts.
I remember when TLC was about learning. What happened? Curse of Oak Island is stretched out way too much. That buried treasure story is interesting but not that much.
I think the problem was that Survivor became a smash hit for CBS in 2000, and every cable and over the air network fell over themselves to try to replicate its success with reality shows of their own. From a business perspective, it also helped that they were dirt cheap to produce and get easy short-term returns on.
Of course, they all had varying degrees of success, and a lot of cable networks that formerly had specific focuses like Speed, TLC, History Channel, MTV, etc. saw much of their audience leave once these programs started proliferating their schedules.
They came the expense of more thoughtful, albeit less Schadenfreude-like programming that people tuned into those networks to get away from, alienating their core audience and only attracting fair-weather viewers that would leave when those shows were no longer the hot trendy thing.
Which brings us to where we're at now: multiple networks with no real focus or core audience desperately trying to throw anything at the wall to see what sticks in order to just barely stay afloat. It's why MTV's schedule is little more than Ridiculousness marathons all day, and History and Discovery Channel pretty much rerun the same shows and episodes all day with very little variety.
With the legend being that 6 out of the 7 people required to die for the treasure to be found, I’ve always been a proponent of playing Russian roulette till someone loses and digging at that spot.
And turn one of the national Fox Sports networks back into the Speed Channel. Then give it the documentary, digest, news, and live event programming that made it so beloved in the Speedvision and early Speed Channel years.
I also call for MTV to become an all music genre network again, Fuse to return to a focus on alternative music, and A&E to become a real arts network again. All the other networks you mentioned should revive the focuses from their early-mid '90s heydays.
MTGA- Make Television Great Again!
Elon can't do everything. Needs to be a big cultural shift that says rich people can do cool "passion project" type stuff with their money again instead of endlessly building wells in Africa that get stripped for parts by the locals.
Paul Allen funded some passion project stuff up here (Cinerama was probably the most visible one but there were others) that his advisers almost certainly told him was a bad investment. Lo and behold, when he died the estate divested from them.
I'm still sad about the computer museum.
Not a bad idea. Also do interviews with good authors and like you said there are a ton of old sci shows or anthology series they could show along with original content
Remember when they used to do blocks of different shows during the weekdays?
Absolutely. I first learned about Night Gallery from the Sci-Fi channel. Along with others like Starman and the original Battlestar. I will say the Battlestar reboot was good
I stopped watching the reboot when they got to the very special episode about abortion.
I thought that episode was great. The feminist female president was forced to outlaw abortion because it represented an existential threat to the survival of the human race. Turns out empowering women to kill their children is death cult retardation.
Saw it so long ago I forgot about that one
Yeah, BSG was good but I can see all the identity politics in it now.
Thankfully I saw it before I was aware. But sometimes I’ll skip episodes of old shows if they bring up certain topics. Although the gay dudes in Barney Miller were funny or they were still funny while discussing whatever topic
I think many seem to agree that the best thing for TV as a whole is a return to the '90s era of specializations and a philosophy that supports programming with actual depth and isn't reliant on displaying gross caricatures of the worst aspects of humanity.
That last point is what I personally see in much of the reality TV that took over the medium in the 2000s and proliferated almost every network.
It wouldn't surprise me if those involved in producing reality TV were receiving some kind of ESG-like funding to enable and exaggerate the worst human behaviors and structure it in a way that would sort of dumb down its viewers.
Then again, that's my rather biased perspective on that topic; I totally understand if others disagree with me.
I guess some major corporation took over and felt something was wrong. Sci-Fi tends to appeal to more men so some moronic corporate suits saw that as an issue. I remember in the early 90s the channel had shows where they interviewed Sci-fi authors or did some sort of deep dive into Sci-fi books. Also they had a lot of great classic shows that aired
The only upside here is the market has to self correct at some point. X is looking into being an all out media conglomeration which is why they support video streaming now, shows and stories surviving on their own with investors versus a network might just be the next step.
Agree. And X allows Alex Jones as well
They'll try to leap onto podcasting but it's too late for most of them. Guys like Tucker already had a personality that meant they could do that leap but these mouthpieces are so bland that it'd be 3 hours of dead air.
The problem is that they have kept talent locked out fir the sake of ideology and because of that all they can hope to do is copy what's popular with no understanding of WHY it's popular.
I was going to say this.
I've said this multiple times both here, and on reddit. The left is going to be gunning so hard to get people off Twitter/X, and to outright destroy it now. They absolutely cannot stand the fact that they no longer have complete control over the messaging/narrative going out to the masses. Those "Community Notes" corrections that now appear every time some entity like The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times, etc. tries to set the narrative (to a BS spin of what really happened) infuriates them. Think about how they used this control during the first Trump presidency. That is now (currently) not available to them, and they are shitting themselves.
The left cannot stand on its own without having total control of the messaging the public is being fed. Once again - normal people don't come to the ideological conclusions that the left has tried to propagandize everyone into having. They are indoctrinated into all the crazy shit (the trans stuff, the hating your own race stuff, the hating your own country stuff, etc). Thus, they need Musk/X to fail. They're entire existence depends on having the control that he (and others) are taking away.
Maybe they can make their own platforms
It's only everyone else on the planet that's the issue.
Why don't they build their own everyone else on the planet?
They're trying their damnedest.
There's been a real about-face with cable regional sports networks as well.
About a decade ago, there was lots of talk in the baseball/cable network world that live sports like baseball would prop up cable companies because men would continue to watch & pay for live sports which didn't lend themselves well to on-demand streaming models.
A bunch of midmarket baseball teams signed ludicrous contracts with some of these regional sports networks for the exclusive rights to broadcast the local 9s games.
Baseball is a very regional sport. Most of the revenue still comes from gate receipts and broadcasting rights because it's not a national product: people only care about their local team and don't watch nationally televised games.
Payrolls, salaries and collective bargaining agreements have really become inflated assuming that these ludicrous nine-figure cable deals were the new normal.
The business model worked that local baseball fans would stay subscribed to the RSN channel with high fees to watch their team, but still more normies would end up paying the same fees without knowing by subscribing to bundled cable packages.
Over the last few years, the main player who signed a lot of these broadcasting agreements, Sinclair Broadcasting/Bally Sports has essentially gone bankrupt, walking away from their end of the deal before it expired. A lot of midmarket baseball teams who had already budgeted that future revenue were suddenly left without a broadcaster, but still left to pay guaranteed player salaries. The MLB Head Office has had to intervene to run interference so that it doesn't look like their league's broadcasting rights for all but their marquee market teams have no value.
The MLB actually pioneered digital streaming of live games, but completely dropped the ball on capitalizing on the early adoption. The league ended selling their MLB Advanced Media streaming platform to ?Disney years ago just so that the 30 team owners would get a 30 million or so cash dividend.
The league does sell a year-long streaming package to stream games digitally, but geofences access with blackouts so that users can only watch out-of-market games but can't watch locally. There are some places in the Midwest like Iowa where locals are blacked out from watching something like 7 teams despite there being no major league team in the state simply due to overlapping territorial claims.
The geofencing & the digital blackouts are mostly in place to protect the value of the previously highly-priced TV broadcast rights each team had sold.
In the last few years, the MLB has allowed some local teams to sell local digital live game streaming rights directly to consumers. But most teams have simply bundled this as part of a perk to the regional sports network cable package.
Liberal media and games cannot die fast enough
I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that this ultimately increases political tensions because there's no more "mainstream media" to loosely tie the country in to a common narrative. Instead of just the terminally online retreating into our respective echo chambers to radicalize, now the normies are going to be joining us.
I think the ESG bucks dried up as we are not far along into worldwide communism for local currencies to be useless & political patronage being the real currency.
They can't die fast enough. Hopefully whatever rises to replace them vet their "journalists" thoroughly and burn all feminist resumes to the ground