The sad devolution of Discovery Channel | Hacker News Reader

The sad devolution of Discovery Channel

qz.com

25 pointssrikar23 comments

There'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.

How about "Ancient Aliens" on "History" Channel?

Let's face it - the idiots are a better market.

I 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...

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

It is entertaining - I laugh a lot with it - but it has absolutely nothing with history and, believe me, some people think that because it's on "The History Channel" then it must be history.

This whole stupidity is rooted on the silly notion that every hypothesis, however wild, untestable or ridiculous, is equally valid and deserves the same level of attention afforded to the actually good ones, that people are entitled to their opinions, however wrong they are because, somehow, opinions became important elements of self-expression and a defining aspect of one's identity. If you happen to hold an opinion that's wrong, be prepared to see it torn to shreds and, accordingly, to change your mind.

For the record, I too found the WWII programming a bit repetitive. But before sponsoring "ancient alien theories" (and I cringe when I write "theories" here) they should have changed their name to "Stupidity Channel" or "Superstition Channel" or even "It's Stupid, But You'll Still Watch It Channel".

I 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.

Did you happen to read the article linked from this OP's? TLC changed its tagline to "Everyone needs a little TLC", more or less explicitly jettisoning any association with "learning"

http://qz.com/239882/american-cable-tv-has-now-reached-total...

Remember when you could watch music videos all day on MTV?

In 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).

I cannot understand why your staff arrange the same story of Ancient Alient of some what "Special Story series" in the past few days at the times when your channel was working in Hong Kong. I fell boring. I wish if you would add another stories between your Special Story Series. Thanks. Lung

It turns out it makes more business sense to have programming that caters to a particular viewer demographics, regardless of subject matter.

In 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.

I 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.

It 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?

Easy 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.

Remember when MTV used to play videos?

It still does. There's just no music in them.

So yes, yes I do.

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.

(Opera on Ubuntu, which yesterday had no trouble dealing with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8172365 where other combinations were having trouble - welcome to the fragmented web; let us party like 'twas 1999)

Tested it in Chrome and Firefox on Ubuntu. I think the problem is with Opera.

Works perfectly here (Chrome on Mac)

This is nothing compared to the fall of TLC. It used to be called The Learning Channel!

Remember when American TV news stations reported the news - and not opinion pieces?

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

We now find ourselves with 999 channels of "Ow, my balls".

Idiocracy was prophesy.

Most 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.

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