All of that is on streaming, and worse.

A lot of TV has always just been a way to fill the gaps between the adverts as cheaply as possible. Moving from 4 channels to 200 didn't increase the amount of stuff you could watch, it just spread it all over the place.

It ate itself, streaming is going the same way. Maybe they'll eventually catch on and have a service that contains every movie and TV show (once they've finished in the theatre, and past the Blu-ray/Pay-per-view part of their lifespan where people will pay for it individually), for like £30 a month, and it can be like Spotify and the other music services. A Kaleidescape for poor people. Until then I've gone back to mostly yarring it for any new stuff, and using a Jellyfin server.

Nobody wants a dozen services to look through, even if they did have more money than sense.

This is unfortunately not hyperbole but incredibly and sadly accurate because but neglects to mention aliens on history channel and that it's hard to find weather on weather channel due to insane amount of ads. TV has gone the way of AM radio.

I'm old enough to remember when discovery showed space stuff like, all the time. It was great!

It really changed in the 90s when congress pulled public funding for educational TV

Gold-diggers have it real good, two areas of influence

I love you weather channel, never change weather channel

All their good content is moved to the streaming services. why make less money being bundled on cable when you can charge people whatever for the content and make way more? At least that’s why I think the content on cable is trash at the moment

Not that streaming is any better though.

Isn't the weather channel just mostly ads now?

It’s only a matter of time before the weather reality channel featuring weather

So disappointed to hear about what happened to Discovery channel. Though their Youtube channel is still amazing!

We don't have tv anymore since around 2000, before we just watched VH-1'n'stuff, not because "it's all so bad for the kids" - it is, but that wasn't the main reason, it's just shit) we watched SpongeBob over Internet with our (at that time) little daughter in English, not our native tongue german, she had an easy entry into studying internationally because she just spoke English almost better than German. She told me once she even dreams in English most of the time, so we speak our own little germish/engleutsch mix during the day here, it's partially more efficient to communicate that way (including some family neologisms)

Television is shit

YouTube is shit

Tuning to G4 and there's a 90% chance it's either COPS or Cheaters

There were still some okay shows on animal planet, last time I checked, when I stopped at a hotel and turned on a TV. They had a treehouse building one that was cool... Don't know why it was on animal planet, but still

I'm an expat American who has lived outside of the US for 17 years. Last time I went back there was 8 years ago. 2 years ago I got a pen pal from the US who just LOVES talking about these trashy cable shows. I'm also kinda 48 years old. So, I remember when cable became a new thingy. People said cable programming was trash since cable programming came into existence. Sure, the programming wasn't all realities. MTV had music on it. You know what the adults said about MTV (including my parents?) They said, "All that sex in the music videos. So perverted." Just imagine the scandal of playing Madonna's "Like a Prayer" every hour on the hour on MTV in its heyday. I remember telling my mother, "It's a great song! I like it!" before being shuffled off to Sunday catechism, which I escaped from to smoke cigs in the woods behind the church/convent. I'd ride home from catechism in the car reciting the words to "Like a Prayer" and any other Madonna song that came to mind. Plus I'd recite some Prince at my parents, another nice rebel on the MTV cable tube played constantly back then. Maybe following reality TV is a new form of subversion. Maybe it exposes the meta of celebrity. People are hip to this, especially very young people. Very young people are so aware of the meta everything and know how to use it for subversion.