< Network Decay

Network Decay/Slipped

  • This Trope was invoked when Animax Asia announced that they'll be adding Koreanovelas (Korean drama series) into their primetime lineup starting May 2010. That's right — what was once an all anime shows from morning to evening was added with Korean soap dramas. What's even worse was they even pushed back Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood into 9:30 PM Fridays in place of these K-soaps, which is sad since they're the ones to broadcast brand-new episodes of Brotherhood the same week they're telecast. It got better over time, though, with the Korean shows being only on Saturdays then completely disappearing. The only piece of Korean entertainment left is the Anime adaptation of Winter Sonata. Seems like it was just Filler for air time.
  • TV Land started out as basically Nick At Nite 2, focusing on old TV shows not even Nick at Nite showed anymore — Gilligan's Island, Mister Ed, Father Knows Best, etc. Lately, though, it's been following a similar track, airing shows that are either incredibly recent (Extreme Makeover: Home Edition?!) or original reality series that don't have anything to do with classic TV such as She's Got the Look (one can respect what they're doing with that show, but it doesn't belong there), Scrubs and CSI.

    The problem that TV Land faces is that what's considered "old" is constantly shifting as the viewing audience is replaced by younger generations (similar to what's happening with oldies radio) and the difficulty in finding shows they can afford the rights to. Shows that enter or are produced in syndication are easier to afford and come by and many older shows are ceasing to exist at all.
  • CNN Headline News was originally 24 hours of just headline news, in the form of a thirty-minute newscast that repeated throughout the day. Recently the channel has been adding talk shows, tabloid material, all the pundits you can eat, and Missing White Woman Syndrome coverage, along with foaming up the shut-in crowd to complain to their Facebook about inane human-interest stories which anyone with intelligence doesn't care about or knows is beyond stupid to cover in a certain way (mainly of the "school tells girl to go home and change due to offensive appearance, parent claims violation of the Geneva Conventions" variety). In December 2008, it changed its on-air branding to "HLN", perhaps keeping with its increasingly downmarket focus.
  • Not a network, but PBS' historical documentary series Secrets of the Dead originally followed investigators using modern-day science to learn about the long-ago dead. Now it just shows any documentary related to history, with the spooky title sequence quickly becoming The Artifact. For example, in their recent "Doping for Gold", about East German authorities drugging their Olympic athletes in the 1970s and 1980s, pretty much everyone involved in the story was still living and, in fact, interviewed for the show.
  • Subjective example — Investigation Discovery was pretty much a spinoff of Discovery channel, and it mostly ran stuff like 48 hours: Hard Evidence and Dateline on NBC (recently adding I (Almost) Got Away With It, detailing criminals who almost got away with their crimes) which were basically news reports on real-life crimes, legal dramas (sometimes bringing in controversial subjects like falling asleep at the wheel being considered as a capital offense), and forensic science shows detailing the processes and how they were important in either convicting the criminal(s) or figuring out what went wrong. Occasionally, stuff like Dr. G: Medical Examiner or shows about disaster investigation show up on that channel, but Your Mileage May Vary on whether this is decay. Dr. G is after all about autopsies (a pretty big part of murder investigations), and shows about disaster investigation are, after all, investigations. They're just not entirely crime or are related to crime in most ways (Dr. G often has people who died of drug overdoses, accidents, stupidity, or diseases they didn't know about).

    More recently as of January 2011, Dr. G moved over to Discovery Health and Fitness channel. That move brought Investigation Discovery back to mostly crime shows and perhaps back to recovery.
  • Game Show Network, now GSN. The decay started in October 1997, when they lost the rights to all shows from the Mark Goodson-Bill Todman library (except The Price Is Right and the 1994-95 season of Family Feud when Richard Dawson returned) for six months, called the Dark Period. The Goodson-Todman shows returned in April 1998, but there was less variety for a while on the daily schedule and some programs remained MIA. Then came an onslaught of lame original programming (Extreme Gong, Throut and Neck, D.J. Games) along with credit crunches and editing out fee plugs began, which would go on to continue to plague the network for classic game show fans. The rights to The Price Is Right would be lost for good in April 2000, and vintage black-and-white shows of the 1950s and 1960s became rarer still. The quality of the network has been fluctuating ever since, up to its name change, which led to not just game shows being seen there (reality, casino, and other "games" would debut on the schedule). There are constant debates on what should and shouldn't be on the schedules, though they seem to be leaning back towards the game show genre again, and in recent years have occasionally brought out some nice surprises.
  • The Discovery Channel still shows plenty of actual documentary material, despite having been decaying for almost as long as MTV has. In the late 80s the lineup was mostly serious documentaries, the most famous of which was Wings (no relation to the sitcom except for a focus on aircraft) but which also included classy repackaged BBC imports like Making of a Continent — and once a year there was Shark Week, which was just what you'd expect. By the mid-1990s, they showed an obscene amount of home improvement shows and cooking shows aimed at stay-at-home moms (enough to spawn the spin-off Discovery Home & Leisure Channel, now Planet Green) and Wings had proven so popular it had been farmed out to its own spin-off, Discovery Wings Channel (now Military Channel). Now, they're being swamped with "guys building and/or blowing things up" shows in the vein of MythBusters and Monster Garage. And about four different shows about credulous idiots with no critical thinking skills ghost hunters. In 2005, Discovery debuted Cash Cab, a game show that takes place in the back of a cab, leaving one unsure whether it even has a theme beyond "non-fiction". It gets weird when you realize that they're knocking some of their own shows off, especially Mythbusters into Smash Lab (with a focus on safety measures) and How It's Made into Some Assembly Required. The latter has almost only done products featured in the former (though How It's Made has been on for just about ten years, so it's hard to find something they haven't done). The Discovery Channel also used to contain a lot of nature, which is where the now-classic Shark Week (which they still air regularly) originated from. But it seems that explosions have taken the place of tigers ripping stuff to pieces. Most of the nature shows have since been relegated to Animal Planet.
    • The UK version is showing movies.
    • The Brazilian Discovery Channel is mostly true to its roots, in the sense that the Mythbusters is still the closest thing to a reality show it airs currently (although Monster Garage and others have already came and gone). However, much like the History Channel in the United States (see above), it has recently been airing subject matter that can be charitably described as pseudoscience. After watching what some thought was a mockumentary (it wasn't) about how creationism was certainly real (not "plausible", but real), complete with how "easy" it was to build Noah's Ark, several viewers have refused to watch or trust any Discovery Channel documentaries since.
    • The Dutch Discovery Channel has recently been airing Soccer matches.
  • Teletoon, in their efforts to be as much like Cartoon Network's Canadian equivalent (well, they do share most of each other's shows), have lately added more and more live-action movies to their lineup. Their license mandates it has to be "animated" or "animation-related", which apparently includes "based on a comic book" as they've shown various comic book movies. Apparently, "has a cartoon based on it" also counts — Spaceballs and The Matrix have also been shown...And then they threw out said rules for live-action films by airing Gremlins, which might explain shows like Majority Rule.
    • Their Retro spinoff channel (the equivalent of Boomerang) has been good about remaining animated so far (even the arguable exceptions of Fraggle Rock and The Banana Splits are a puppet show and contain cartoon segments, respectively), but are stretching the definition of "retro" with fifteen-year-old shows like ReBoot and King of the Hill. Then again, their definition of "retro" is any show that's more than ten years old.
  • American Movie Classics (AMC) originally showed commercial-free screenings of films from the black-and-white era into The Sixties. While it's been suggested that later rival Turner Classic Movies was responsible for AMC's shift by cutting into its available library of films, it was actually due to the channel choosing to pursue a younger demographic. It now consists largely of commercial-laden broadcasts of modern films and scripted dramas like Mad Men and Breaking Bad; unusually for this trope, they're actually critically-acclaimed original series, so this (arguably) was an improvement. Naturally, it's now referred to only as AMC.
  • National Geographic Channel, or "Nat Geo", is showing signs of slippage. The National Geographic Society's website features the slogan "Inspiring People to Care About the Planet"; how exactly they're accomplishing this with The Dog Whisperer, Locked Up Abroad, Is It Real? and shows about bounty hunters is left as an exercise for the viewer.
  • There was once a time when YTV's mandate was "programming for the whole family", but they have largely abandoned that mantra in favor of "programming for kids aged 13 and under". When the Canadian channel first started in 1988, it showed a wide range of programming (up to and including The Carol Burnett Show, the original Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, Bonanza, The Muppet Show and many more family-oriented shows, Britcoms like Are You Being Served?). Throughout the 90's, the station, buoyed by its original programming and "The Zone" afternoon block, was a household name. The station flourished with programming aimed towards 16-20-year-olds, as well as mature content in pre-watershed hours (including uncut airings of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Farscape. The channel was also the go-to place for anime in Canada in the 1990s and early-to-mid 2000s, but has mostly expunged it from its lineup, barring Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's and Pretty Cure (all banished to early Saturday morning showtimes). As time went on, the network has also become obsessed with cheap Canadian reality shows and Nickelodeon fare like iCarly (to the point that they'll air the show up to three times a night on every other hour), while largely neglecting the edgy and unique content that made them successful in the 90s.
  • The Weather Channel used to be all-weather all-the-time, but in recent[when?] years has added documentary programs such as Storm Stories, It Could Happen Tomorrow, and recently When Weather Changed History, the latter two closer to an un-decayed Discovery or History Channel than Weather. Some of these programs actually feature earthquakes and volcanoes and meteor strikes on Earth, which aren't exactly weather material. In the evening, one may be lucky to get up to two hours of current weather news; which, unfortunately, is when much of the bad stuff happens. Fortunately, they do suspend said documentary programs whenever particularly dangerous weather situations develop.
    • In this case it's a survival mechanism, as the simple graphic display of the weather they used to capitalize on is available at the press of a button on most digital cable services, the Internet (TWC owns Weather.com), cell phones, and even some game consoles.[1] [2] Ironically, it got so bad in early 2010 (Movies? Really?) that Dish Network threatened to drop the channel. As a result, they've adopted a Bloomberg-style information frame with local weather info during the entertainment content. Still, this makes the Bloodhound Gang's line "record The Weather Channel so I can watch it later" almost pathetically prophetic.
    • Averted with The Weather Network/Météo Média, its Canadian equivalent. The channel is still mostly dedicated to weather reporting and news around the clock, with some short feature segments about lawn & gardening, vacation spots, fishing, etc. sprinkled here and there. However, it is criticized for showing too much advertising.
  • The Classic Sports Network was originally designed to re-air vintage games from the 1950s through 1970s. After ESPN bought the channel, they began to shift more and more toward games of more recent vintage, and in the last few years have dropped most of the old game broadcasts altogether in favor of documentaries, sports-themed movies, American Gladiators, boxing, plenty of old bowling tournaments, and lots and lots of poker tournaments. Also overrun games and matches from lower-tier conferences air here just in case even ESPNU isn't enough to contain a busy day of sports action across the regular ESPNs and ESPN Deportes. This is probably more an example of forced decay though. As the leagues, college conferences, and individual teams have started their own cable networks, they've subsequently needed this classic programming to fill plenty of time for their own networks since you can only analyze your own current teams so much. Since they own the footage and need a lure for viewers to tune in when teams aren't playing, they've pulled it off ESPN Classic. However since there's virtually no demand for a boxing network due to the sport's current low popularity, that stays on ESPN Classic while the bowling and poker programs are in-house productions which can be reran ad nauseum for only the cost of electricity and the wage of the guy making sure the tape or hard drive doesn't break.
  • MuchMusic, the Canadian equivalent of MTV, has suffered from a large amount of degradation over the past decade, though not to the extent of its American counterpart (its broadcast license requires it to air music videos). MuchMusic was essentially a free-for-all in the 1980s and 1990s, with few (if any) songs being censored and a wide variety of programming catering to virtually every taste (including programs devoted to rap and French music), as well as lots of indie bands getting a chance to shine through music video rotation. Between 2003 and 2006, most of the long-running VJs jumped ship and left for greener pastures, the station canned many of its unique and interesting shows[3], and then it split its programming up into five separate channels (three of which are on digital cable, so you have to pay more if you want to watch them). The network then shifted their focus onto reality shows (like the Much VJ Search and American imports). Recently, many people (including many Canadian media outlets) lamented the fact that the station did absolutely nothing to celebrate its 25th anniversary. It was, quite literally, up to the fans to broadcast their own tributes for a station that had almost no trace of the elements that made it so popular and unique in the first place. Said media outlets also noted that MTV Canada (the all-reality and talk show offshoot of the original American channel, which is also owned by MuchMusic's parent company) is considered to be more relevant to young teenagers!
    • Much's sister station, MuchMore, also suffered from this (although less so than its predecessor). When it first started as MuchMoreMusic in 1998, the station was a quirky offshoot that promoted alternative, indie and foreign music, and proved to be a hit with viewers. The station also ran old Much game shows, had news segments and generally billed itself to be the "softer and lighter" sister station... that is, until CTVGlobeMedia (now Bell Media) got their hands on it. The station slowly transitioned to become a dumping ground for bad VH-1 reality shows, old reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and One Tree Hill, Late Night With Jimmy Fallon and movies that have no connection to music whatsoever. Granted, the station still plays two-hour music video blocks in evening and morning hours, but its current programming is a far cry from the unique station it used to be.
  • French-Canadian channel Ztélé advertised itself as "TV Of The Future" — i.e., a channel dedicated to all things technological and sci-fi (with some supernatural thrown in) — at its debut in 2000. Recently however, the sci-fi part of the channel has been getting the shaft, with an increased emphasis on heavy machinery and cars and most fiction series are nearer to fantasy than sci-fi. While the former still first the network name, the latter has fans really concerned. (The only shows currently broadcast worthy of the title of sci-fi are Sanctuary, Torchwood, Eureka, and Chuck...yes, Chuck.)
  • Gospel Music Channel may be trying to set a record for ditching both any elements of Gospel and Music as of February 2010. Where the channel was formerly dominated by gospel and Christian contemporary music, yet again the powers that be (sound familiar, Hallmark Channel viewers?) want to either get on a cable system or stand out in the "Faith & Values" digital cable tier where it's stuck between the apocalyptic ramblings of TBN and Daystar personalities. It now carries many of the Left Behind films and every original show ever produced by PAX, along with Amen, Sister Sister, and any sitcom or drama which has a somewhat spiritual bent (yes, Promised Land has now found its seventh cable home since cancellation!), while the "gospel music" is pushed to mornings, Sundays, and special events programming. Also, the channel is now branded only "GMC".
  • Retro Television Network (also known as RTV, formerly RTN), a network of classic TV programming seen on the digital subchannels of local television stations, has faced some struggles mainly related to their former ownership under Equity Broadcasting. The network was in danger of fading away after Equity didn't pay the bill to the rights for CBS/Paramount shows, and again after the network owner decided to air something that totally makes sense between reruns of The Incredible Hulk and Knight Rider — a nightly poorly-produced and very little-watched political talk show called Unreliable Sources hosted by an eighth-rate Rush Limbaugh clone (who just happens to be one of the higher-ups at Equity) that came out of the hotbed of television production that is Little Rock, Arkansas. Then in January 2009, Equity fell completely apart, declaring bankruptcy, which ended up throwing several of their stations off the air because Equity couldn't afford the digital upgrade later in the year. RTV had been taken over by another entity (Luken Communications) who leased Equity's master control distribution system (apparently a system so complicated it was a copyrighted concept, and also involved Equity-owned stations such as FOX affiliates from as far as Montana and Michigan's Upper Peninsula being ran completely from Little Rock). But then Equity issued a Take That and tried to pull the plug on their own creation by throwing out the new RTV owners and forcing viewers through a month-long process that involved a complete rebuilding of RTV's infrastructure in Chattanooga, Tennessee by Luken. Unreliable Sources was canned immediately and the network has resumed an almost all-classic TV lineup (besides a light morning talk show, Daytime, from one of their affiliates [4], which has since been cancelled). However, in 2011 the network lost the rights to NBC Universal's library and Sony's library to competitors Me-TV and Antenna TV respectively, and is stuck with awesome "retro" programming like episodes of Crook and Chase from 1995, car shows, horribly cheap Canadian crime dramas, Highway to Heaven, and the true parameter of awfulness, Cold Case Files repeats. This has lost them many affiliates to Antenna TV, Me-TV, the lifestyle-oriented Live Well Network (owned by Disney/ABC), and the independent African American network Bounce TV.
  • TG4 (originally T na G, aka "Teleifís na Gaeilge") began as a channel devoted to Irish-language shows. Though it still shows many series in Irish, increasing amounts of time are given to American series such as Cold Case and Nip/Tuck as well as Westerns and French films. Most viewers wouldn't mind so much if these shows at least had Irish subtitles in the same way that most of the shows which feature Irish dialogue have English subtitles. One Egregious example was the Hector O'hEochagáin Show, which had dialogue in both Irish and English. The Irish was subtitled, but the English wasn't.
  • While they still air programming related to the great outdoors, OLN (Outdoor Life Network) in Canada is running shows such as Ghost Hunters and UFO Hunters. And then they introduced Man vs. Food, because nothing says "the outdoors" like a dude gorging on excessive amounts of food.
  • IFC, a cable channel originally devoted to showing independent films commercial free and uncut has always had original programming, but in 2010 they started to acquire the rights to many Too Good to Last and/or cultly admired television shows, like Monty Python's Flying Circus, Arrested Development, and Undeclared. They also began to show mainstream films that were technically still independently financed, like A Fish Called Wanda, in addition to their regular indie fare. The biggest blow to the channel came in December 2010, when they started to show commercials during their programming (instead of just between films) — including their films (still uncut for content and time, but have two minutes of commercials inserted in random places) — while announcing a half-dozen more shows they'd acquired. This switch from being an indie film channel to cult show central isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially since the company that owns IFC (Rainbow Media) bought Sundance Channel in 2008 and both channels pretty much did the same thing, though some view the addition of advertising as foreshadowing further decay.
    • IFC's decay is continuing as much of its lineup now consists of mainstream films and the said TV shows with only a few hours devoted to airing independent films. Much of the independent films have moved to Sundance but even they aren't immune, as about half their lineup is devoted to reality shows.
  • ReelzChannel bills itself as "TV about movies", and began with a format which consisted of six movie news-related programs airing in a loop throughout the day back in 2006. However this quickly proved to be monotonous and low-rated (E! also started with a channel format like this but also eventually changed in 1990), not to mention that the Internet has proven to be a better way to find out about entertainment news and criticism than watching a traditional 'junkets and press releases' program on ReelzChannel, along with the studios holding back publicity material for film's website and/or their DVDs. Thus the channel still has some of those movie news shows, but because of forced decay also airs sitcom reruns like Becker, 3rd Rock from the Sun, and Ally McBeal that few watch these days, along with Johnny Carson's Comedy Classics. The network also picked up "The Kennedys", a heavily-criticized bio film disowned by History Channel, to try to gain some publicity and carriage, no matter how negative, for the channel, and also killed their "talk about movies but never show them" format by picking up a few 80's and 90's films to air. Airing "The Kennedys" may have been a good move for them. Reviews weren't bad, the ratings were decent (but high for the channel) and it won Greg Kinnear an Emmy.
  • Universal HD is the drama equivalent of ReelzChannel these days. Originally created to air USA and Bravo's programming in HD before mainstream networks got 24/7 HD simulcast networks, UHD seems to be wandering in the wilderness. Outside of airing Saturday night encores of WWE's weekly shows, remastered HD versions of Charlie's Angels and T. J. Hooker, and plenty of HD Universal Studios films, the network also seems to be the home of the worst network drama flops of the 2000's which can count their episodes in the single to teen digits, including Clubhouse, Sex, Love & Secrets, That's Life, South Beach, Philly, Kidnapped, and Three Pounds, by virtue of them solely being HD and cheap to buy because of their lack of success. The network also no longer has an purpose in Olympic years with the merger of Versus into the NBC Sports Network.
  • The Science Channel, or Science, was conceived as a network that aired programming about real science. It has recently started airing certain science fiction programs, such as Firefly. Not that fans are necessarily complaining... although the recent addition of Dark Matters: Twisted But True to the channel's lineup suggests it's about to slip into the same pop-pseudoscience garbage that the History Channel gets dissed for showing.

    In addition, they've picked up An Idiot Abroad and also regularly marathon the show Oddities, a show about trading obscure, macabre, and rare items made by the same guys behind Pawn Stars, both of which have very little to do with science.
  • Def II was BBC 2's strand for "youth" programming in the late 80s/early 90s, broadcasting for a couple of hours in early evenings most days. They started off with fairly decent documentaries/current affairs, credible music shows, and some quirky reruns. But by the time it was cancelled its reduced running time comprised mainstream sitcom Fresh Prince of Bel Air, ancient repeats of Buck Rogers, and the jawdroppingly-moronic music program Dance Energy, i.e. anything cheap that might attract a few ironic students or small children. Eventually they dropped the branding and absorbed what was left into the main schedules. (Now British teenagers have BBC 3, a whole channel to themselves, full of documentaries on obese teenage mothers and Family Guy repeats.)
  • In Australia, ONE HD was established as a sports channel before beginning to play movies and now drama series such as Sons of Anarchy and COPS. This change was arguably inevitable, due to the parent Ten Network deciding to establish a sports channel when it didn't really have the rights to any sports that Australians might actually want to watch, certainly not enough to enable 24/7 sports programming. (This led a rival network executive to deride the channel as being about "truck racing from Idaho".)
  • The case of Hungary's Animax isn't as severe as those of its above described namesakes, but a pattern is clearly noticeable. Before taking on its current name under the ownership of Sony Pictures, it was called A+, and focused entirely on Japanese animation (both dubbed and subbed) with some American cartoons thrown into the mix. This trend continued under its new name, but in 2009, they decided to turn the channel into a general youth entertainment network, and started airing all sorts of American talent shows, scripted live-action series and movies (mostly taken from AXN's showcase), as well as some Japanese ones. New anime series are added to the list noticeably less frequently than before, but what makes the situation really bothersome is that Animax only airs from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m., and about half of that airtime is just reruns. As such, the intrusion of the live-action programming appears more jarring.
  • Animal Planet has been slipping some lately. In 2008, the channel was revamped and many new programs were added in an attempt to attract the adult, more mainstream audience. Fewer documentaries are being shown, and the currently running shows (such as Tanked And Hillybilly Handfishing) focus more on people than on animals. One show, Haunting, is basically a generic ghost/paranormal show with a passing mention of the dog barking at nothing. Two other paranormal shows on the network Lost Tapes and Freak Encounters are mostly about people finding or encountering things of cryptozoology and myth, though primary animals others have slipped in. The shows that actually focus on animals (such as Fatal Attractions, and Infested!) generally portray them in a negative light. Much of the current programming could be described as "TLC with animal themes".
  • Canada's Showcase Television once billed itself as "Television Without Borders" - an accurate description. Created by a coalition of burgeoning producers and production companies, Showcase truly broke new ground in Canadian specialty television - this is a channel that played mature-rated television series and films in pre-watershed hours, devoted an entire Friday block of programming to HBO series and risque material (including an original series focusing on fetishes) and generally had a devil-may-care attitude when it came to what was and wasn't acceptable for Canadian broadcast standards. The channel carried a mix of well-known Canadian series (Da Vinci's Inquest, Due South), American dramas (Oz, The L Word, Six Feet Under), weird erotica from foreign countries, British imports like Cracker, original series (many of which were softcore porn) and much more. However, when the station was acquired by Shaw Media in 2010, that "devil-may-care" attitude was punted out the door, and the station refocused itself as a dumping ground for American drama imports and lots of infomercials - a far cry from what it used to be. The network, pulling a move which should be impossible in this era even forgot to air a new episode of Lost Girl it promoted for weeks in October 2011, earning voluminous anger from fans of that series.
  • Some regional cable channel examples from Canada:
    • In Atlantic Canada, there is ASN (Atlantic Satellite Network). Upon its launch, it was a sister channel to the ATV system of CTV affiliates in the Maritime provinces, now known as CTV Atlantic. In the early days, ASN was generally a local version of Citytv in Toronto, but carried some educational shows either produced by universities across Atlantic Canada or sourced from TVOntario, such as The Polka Dot Door or Todays Special, which themselves then disappeared, replaced by an Atlantic Canada version of Citytv's Breakfast Television. [5] By 1997, after it was traded from CHUM to Baton Broadcasting/CTV, ASN generally remained the de facto Atlantic Canada version of Citytv, until the mid-2000s, when a large supply of programming sourced from CHUM declined, with more of its content supplied in-house by CTV, including Canadian Idol and some sports coverage, partially to compensate for the loss of a CTV affiliate on basic cable in Newfoundland and Labrador in 2002. [6] In 2008, after CTVglobemedia (now Bell Media) bought out ASN's former parent CHUM, it became an affiliate of the revamped A-Channel (later A) system, becoming A Atlantic, but continued to air Breakfast Television under license from the new owner of Citytv, Rogers. [7] However, this is no longer the case, as the A system was renamed CTV Two in 2011, and the ASN/A Atlantic version of Breakfast Television was renamed CTV Morning Live to correspond to the channel's new name as CTV Two Atlantic.
    • In Alberta, there is the Access Network, established as an educational cable channel in the 1970s by the government of Alberta [8]. However, by the mid-1990s, funding was cut for the channel, which was then privatized, sold to a consortium led by CHUM, and renamed Access. Though Access generally remained educational, it carried some general entertainment programs that could hardly qualify as educational, not to mention beginning to air commercials. It even carried the educational programs The Colbert Report and Drawn Together at one point. When CTVglobemedia acquired CHUM, Access was rebranded in 2008 to be more of a semi-affiliate of the A system in the sense that it carried prime time shows from A, but was still otherwise an "educational independent". This changed in 2011, when Access and A Atlantic (the channel formerly known as ASN) were integrated into the renamed CTV Two system. As a result of this change, Access became "CTV Two Alberta", and most of the educational programming the channel was once established for was dropped.
  • The Canadian channel Bravo! (no relation to the US channel or the UK channel which both have the same name minus the exclamation point) has always been oriented towards arts and culture-related programming since its inception. It also airs independently produced short films from Canadian artists financed through the channel's Bravo!Fact fund. However, it has more recently shifted towards television and film dramas by, for example, airing episodes of Mad Men and various feature films, even more so under current owners Bell Media (which also owns the two regional examples detailed above).
  • As of June 2012, GAC, a rival to CMT, is airing reruns of shows like Paula's Home Cooking, Road Tasted, and John Ratzenberg's Made in America, shows that have nothing to do with country music.
Back to Network Decay
  1. ↑ But not Wii. Its Forecast Channel is run by Weathernews Inc.
  2. ↑ Indeed, TWC was sold to NBC in order to save Landmark Communications from bankruptcy.
  3. ↑ the MuchAXS music competition show, all the shows created by Ed The Sock creator Steve Kerzner, MuchTopTens, Electric Circus, Intimate and Interactive, and many more — all of which played a sizable amount of music videos or songs
  4. ↑ NBC affiliate WFLA in Tampa, also carried on RTV subchannels of stations owned by WFLA parent company Media General
  5. ↑ Similar to Citytv, ASN carried newscasts, various syndicated shows, "Great Movies" in prime time, and even some cartoons.
  6. ↑ Its CTV affiliate, CJON-TV in St. John's (branded as NTV), lost its CTV affiliation due to a dispute over fee payments.
  7. ↑ As a condition of acquiring CHUM, CTVglobemedia sold Citytv to Rogers Communications.
  8. ↑ although it added terrestrial transmitters in Calgary and Edmonton in the mid-1980s
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