Many cable channels are created to fulfill a specific programming niche, and their name is Exactly What It Says on the Tin — the Golf Channel shows golf, the History Channel shows history programs, the Game Show Network shows Game Shows, and so on.
Some channels, however, are not as wedded to their original concept as others. Meddling executives look at the demographics to whom their channel appeals and decide that, hey, since the people watching their Speculative Fiction channel are mostly 18-31 males, and Professional Wrestling is hot among that demographic, surely no one would mind if they started showing pro-wrestling! *
The fans of the original programming will mind, of course, but the channel tends to keep going regardless. This may show up with only a couple of odd programs in the schedule, but far too often, given enough time, a channel will have pretty much abandoned its original concept. Whether or not the former invariably leads to the latter is a subject for debate.
Since the network is strongly impacted by the ratings, and the highest ratings go to generally the same few demographics, this tends to lead to networks becoming more and more like each other, either in similar programming or outright airing the same shows.
Some changes can be chalked up to the changing landscape of TV. As the number of channels goes up, networks re-align themselves to try and hold some of their market. That, or the parent companies who might own seven or more cable channels each shuffle stuff for "synergy" or to reduce redundancy. Competition with new media is prevalent as well—classic reruns give way to DVD box sets, music-video channels give way to YouTube and iPods, and info-dumping all-text channels give way to the data display in a digital cable box or some new-fangled webernet site. Most of the time, it's just shifting to whatever the network feels will attract the biggest audience—and the audience that lets them charge the most for ads (especially the lucrative young adult demographic, needless to say).
While in many cases this is seen as depressing, this isn't always a bad thing; the channel could just as easily be better after the shift. If the Network Decay works out, it may expose the channel to thousands of new viewers, who would normally never watch the network in the first place. Or perhaps the earlier direction just was not working out and the network made changes in order to get better and more profitable programming. Furthermore, there are several good shows floating around in Development Hell that wouldn't stand a chance of getting picked up unless a network decides to spread its wings.
See Magazine Decay for the print equivalent. See also Artifact Title, They Changed It, Now It Sucks, Screwed by the Network, and Adored by the Network. If it starts overlapping with politics, then it can cross over into Strawman News Media.
Examples:
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Total Abandonment
The entirety of cable TV, since the original premise of cable was that your monthly fee bought you commercial-free TV. Since in those days cable was something you got to watch movies on (were there even any cable channels besides HBO, SHO, and MAX before MTV got started?), the lack of commercials (and the lack of FCC censoring regulation) that allowed showing movies uncut was in fact a huge advantage worth paying for. These days, of course, you pay even more and now have to suffer with movies cut for time, edited for content, "formatted to fit this screen", and liberally strewn with ads.
CATV could be considered even more of an example of this since the original CATV meant 'community antenna television', and was simply a communal antenna, attached to various homes via a cable in areas where reception might have been dodgy at best for individual homes (such as in mountainous regions or remote communities), but didn't provide any 'cable specific' programming.
Perhaps the Trope Codifier and most iconic example of this is MTV, which will maybe show a Music Video at 3:00 AM if you're lucky. The rest of the time is devoted to reality shows that have nothing to do with music (or often, for that matter, reality), as well as programs from other Viacom-owned networks, such as American Gladiators and even Sponge Bob Square Pants.
This decay arguably began with the early-1990s addition to MTV's schedule of The Real World and Beavis And Butthead (which featured music videos, albeit with MST3K-style commentary by the title characters), two of the most popular programs in the network's history. The MTV executives saw this, and started commissioning more non-music shows, until music had been pushed into late night/early morning and the after-school Total Request Live (TRL) block. At one point, they even ran commercials with the tagline "MTV: We Don't Play Music." The final nail in the musical coffin was probably the cancellation of TRL in 2008, although it's still trying to play lip service to its roots with the "FNMTV" block and its new implemented AMTV block of videos on weekday mornings. In 2010, MTV's total abandonment of its music video origins was finally completed with a logo change◊ that omits the words "Music Television" completely.
MTV2 started out as an actual music channel and, for a while after buying out the competing Box music network, became a true haven for music fans with its innovative and bizarre themed video blocks. But its drift, especially since changing its logo to the "two-headed dog", can best be described as, well, MTV, too. (One of its few music-related shows, the indie rock-centric Subterranean, is pushed into the unsatisfactory timeslot of 1:00 AM on Friday mornings.)*
MTV3, by the way, is merely a renamed MTV Tr3s, a Spanish MTV channel which is just MTV's regular schedule with Gratuitous Spanish, subtitles, and some more music videos, though not alot.
MTV's subscription channels have followed a similar pattern, with the metal-centric MTVX being replaced by the rap-centric MTV Jams. MTV Hits, another channel which is still pretty good about music videos, is still going...for now, although it adopted a "playlistism" gimmick in 2006-07. Ditto VH-1 Soul, CMT Pure, and the aforementioned MTV Jams.
In some European countries, MTV still primarily shows music videos. American reality TV isn't nearly as popular outside America. That also used to be true for Latin American MTV, but now it devotes about 70% of its schedule to non-music shows.
In the United Kingdom, thanks to a re-branding effort a couple of years back, MTV UK was now known as MTV One (and is now just plain MTV) and shows nothing but reality shows, animation, and live-action scripted shows such as Pretty Little Liars and Blue Mountain State. *
Bizarrely, the new version of TeenWolf - which was actually produced with MTV - is screened on another channel, Sky Living, instead of MTV UK.
MTV UK's genre channels (MTV Base plays Urban, MTV Two plays indie rock and alternative, to give two examples) have their own programming, but it's related to the music that the channel plays — interviews, that sort of thing. These have recently been cut back in favour of playing more music videos, leading to perhaps the first known instance of MTV being criticised for playing too many music videos. In 2011, MTV UK more or less stopped pretending to be a music channel, moving alongside the entertainment channels on Sky's EPG and launching a new channel called MTV Music to fill in the missing gap.
The French and Walloon (southern Belgium) MTV used to be an English-language channel (weirdly enough). They added subtitles and later dubbing to some of their shows (mostly animated shows and live broadcasts) before adding original French-language shows. This only made sense, considering the market, and they still aired plenty of music videos. However, like its foreign equivalents, it drifted toward reality shows (both original French shows and imported ones). It still airs some music (predominantly hip hop), but late at night.
At one time, there were three music channels in the Netherlands — MTV, The Music Factory (TMF), and The Box. MTV followed the all too familiar pattern with programming first shifting into the mainly R&B/Hip Hop/Rap genre, eventually phasing out to "reality" TV (although nothing Dutch; just stuff from the U.S.). TMF, the first true Dutch music channel, was soon bought out by MTV's parent company and changed from a channel with VJ's and life shows to a SMS-your-thoughts channel in addition to a radical music style change.
The Italian MTV is also taking this route. Until the late 1990s/early 2000s, most of the schedule was composed of blocks of music videos and the occasional anime or South Park episode. Now it airs at least five or six episodes of American reality shows every day, and only two blocks of music — one early in the morning and one late at night. There still is the occasional horror movie or anime, but those can be found only after midnight and change timeslots frequently.
In Australia, pay TV company Foxtel, who has channel numbers ordered by categories, acknowledged this in November 2009, when they moved MTV from channel 808 (8xx being Music Channels) to 124 (1xx being General Entertainment Channels).
New Zealand had C4, which was essentially MTV, up until the first quarter of 2011 when the channel as it was being renamed to 'Four' and another channel being set up to play music videos full-on (now called C4 in the old channel's stead). It remains to be seen whether the cycle will repeat.
This trope is enforced by law for MTV Canada, whose broadcast license specifically prohibits it from airing music videos in order to protect MuchMusic, the Canadian music video network, from foreign competition. (MuchMusic is listed below under "Slipped".) MTV2 Canada, on the other hand, is permitted to air music videos.
MTV's sister channel, VH-1, turned into a channel celebrating pop culture by getting D-list celebrities to comment on it. From there it moved to D-list celebrity reality shows, and currently shows music videos only for a couple hours on weekday mornings. As if anticipating its decay, VH-1 launched VH-1 Classic, a station devoted purely to music and music videos, particularly from the 1970s and 1980s. Even the occasional movie shown was music-related (Footloose and The Wall being two examples). Later, however, it also started to decay — it's still devoted to music, but started airing some of the old VH-1 programs featuring D-list celebrities (though only in mornings and late at night). VH-1 Classic later made a comeback to stop the decay by airing music festivals like Download and creating music-oriented talk shows like That Metal Show, which received positive reviews.
Another French music channel, MCM, began with music related programs, then started adding "cult" anime at night, then mainstream anime in the middle of the day, then MTV-original reality shows, and finally, airing made-for-TV horror movies in their primetime block.
MuchUSA was originally a simulcast of the Canadian network MuchMusic. In 2001, CHUM Limited sold their share of MuchUSA to the network's co-owner, the American cable company Cablevision, who promptly gutted all the Canadian programming and replaced it with original American shows. The network's name was changed to MMUSA, and later Fuse TV. For Fuse TV's own past experience with Network Decay, scroll down to "Temporary Shifts".
The Nashville Network, a country music and culture-oriented channel, morphed into the genreless TNN (The National Network) and ultimately Spike TV. (In a case of decay following decay however, Spike TV: "Television for Guys" all but morphed into the CSI: Crime Scene Investigation repeat network.) This is somewhat understandable — Viacom owned both TNN and CMT, forcing one of the networks to be retooled to avoid redundancy. However, for three years before Viacom bought CBS, the latter company owned both TNN and CMT, and didn't seem concerned about redundancy. And then you have the fact that...
CMT, or Country Music Television, drifted towards programming with little if any connection to country music. In something of a double decay, CMT in 2007 began drifting away from this, showing reruns of shows such as Hogan Knows Best and Nanny 911 along with movies like The Negotiator. Even Time Warner Cable has taken note, suing Viacom for not airing a network consisting of mainly country programming. Viacom responded with corporate buzzspeak about how country fans prefer "“a greater variety of programming...that have the “same types of values and stories embodied by country music". How the Los Angeles-set Lethal Weapon trilogy applies to said country values and stories is a mystery only known to MTV Networks programmers.
In recent years, however, CMT seems to have slid back. In addition to still showing more music videos than any other music channel, they've also found something of a niche with a Deep South flavor to their programming, with The Dukes of Hazzard reruns and a country-specific reboot of The Singing Bee. The one exception to this is Working Class which is only justified by starring Reba McEntire's co-star on Reba, Melissa Peterman. And to be fair, sister channel CMT Pure Country is almost entirely video-focused still, even showing videos from the 80's and 90's.
G4, a struggling video game network, bought out Tech TV, a popular computer enthusiast network with good ratings, merged them into one channel, and basically turned into a geekier version of Spike TV. G4's lineup picked up reality shows like Totally Outrageous Behavior and COPS (titled "COPS 2.0"), Japanese game shows such as Ninja Warrior and Unbeatable Banzuke, and reruns of Star Trek, Lost, and Heroes. Eventually, the only shows left on the network that were relevant to either channel's former demographics were X-Play and Attack of the Show!. To put in perspective how little anyone thinks of G4 since the decay, the premiere of Proving Groundgot 31,000 viewers, less than the population of Juneau, Alaska, while the UFC passed by the opportunity to own G4 for their own network for a deal with Fox. DirecTV even found so little to value in the network that they dropped it, and DirecTV almost never drops networks in comparison with Dish Network.
G4's Canadian counterpart G4 Canada, went under a similar network decay as G4, to the point that the CRTC pressured that G4 Canada was competing against sister channel OLN and deviating too heavily from its purpose, which was to air technology-related programming. They also stated that the channel's "programming is not in compliance with its nature of service definition" and that it detail measures "to ensure that the service is in compliance with its nature of service." [1]
In the UK, similar fates befell Game Network (which drifted towards soft pornography, phone-in quizzes and psychic hotlines, to the point of mercifully dropping the GN brand) and later XLEAGUE.TV (from eSports, to general games, to games-with-some-odd-niche-US-sports, to not broadcasting at all in the space of about 18 months).
A&E ("Arts & Entertainment") used to show artsy films and documentaries for the over-30 audience. Like many other networks, it drifted towards reality shows, CSI: Miami and Crossing Jordan reruns and marathons, and True Crime shows. An executive for the channel even joked at one point that it experienced the fastest drop in average demographic age ever.
A&E's Biography Channel spin-off (now known as "Bio" to deliberately muddle the channel's mission) didn't fare much better; about half the programming eventually consisted of true-crime shows and repeats of shows like Airline. At one point, they even showed reruns of Night Court and NewsRadio in an attempt to be to A&E what Boomerang was to Cartoon Network, these shows having been rerun on A&E in the past.
TLC, originally focusing around science and nature documentaries in the style of the Discovery Channel, drifted toward almost nothing but "home makeover"-style reality shows. In a somewhat confusing (in these days of internet porn) play at grabbing the all-important 18-30 male demographic, TLC acquired the rights to air the Miss America pageant. After sufficient decay consisting of more shows about toddler beauty pageants, pastry chefs, tattoo artists, strange families and Body Horror, one would never guess that TLC used to be called The Learning Channel and was once co-owned by NASA. This just about sums it all up...and this too.
Court TV. Originally, the channel aired only actual courtroom trials, which included the proceedings along with anchor's analysis. Then the channel began carrying original and acquired shows. It was then revamped as TruTV, completely dropping the live court footage that defined it... then started playing court footage for about six hours each weekday. TruTV has recently started showing college basketball during March Madness — which has nothing to do with crime whatsoever.
Then again, many channels or programming blocks that focus on actual courtroom proceedings tend to fall victim to decay because, let's face it, real courtroom drama is about as dramatic as watching paint dry and the ones that actually are dramatic get wall-to-wall coverage on the major media outlets anyway.
E! Entertainment Television is another good example. Originally showing movie previews (like MTV for movie buffs), soap opera and talk show recap programs, and many making-of documentaries and specials that covered everything from theater to animation, it eventually became all about celebrity news (i.e. gossip) and True Hollywood Stories. Then it started airing all sorts of non-celebrity-related reality programs. With shows like The Girls Next Door, Paradise City (The Hills with slightly older people), and Sunset Tan (essentially centering on watching blondes in tanning salons), it comes as no surprise that in some commercials E! openly acknowledged itself as a guilty pleasure channel.
E!'s sister network Style launched as a network which stuck on two popular things in E!'s late-1990s scheduling — their fashion and design coverage — and when it launched it showed mostly runway shows and interior design programs designed to show off the current "styles" of a time period. This decayed into more generic reality programming.
Oxygen was once the anti-Lifetime, airing shows revolving around making women better, Xena: Warrior Princess and Roseanne reruns, and programming about yoga and improving yourself, along with women's sports. By the time NBC bought the channel in 2007 the original partners had long left, and the new management decided programming which exploited women such as the Bad Girls Club, Snapped and the 22 shows revolving around Tori Spelling's love life would do better.
Bravo originally focused on independent cinema and the arts; for example, it was the U.S. outlet for Cirque du Soleil specials/shows for years. They also featured what they termed "TV too good for TV", reruns of past artsy cult-favorite shows like Twin Peaks and Max Headroom shown unedited and free of commercial interruption. Original owners Rainbow Media (also the owner of AMC and IFC, which is a spin-off of Bravo) sold the channel to minority partner NBC in 2002, who originally intended to retool it into a no-genre entertainment channel not unlike TBS, TNT, and eventual corporate sibling USA Network. Around 2004, it began a switch over to a pop-culture/occupational reality show format in the wake of hits like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (as Robot Chicken put it — "Bravo, somewhere along the line we turned reeeeally gay!"), with occasional stragglers like Inside the Actors' Studio still inexplicably present. They also show Law & Order: Criminal Intent and House, M.D. reruns, which are contrary to both their arts and reality programming.
Christian Broadcasting Network, originally launched by Pat Robertson as the cable TV arm of his ministry, gradually began to add more and more sitcom reruns, general entertainment, and other non-religious programming to its lineup throughout The Eighties in a bid to make it onto basic cable lineups outside of the Bible Belt. As the ratio of religious to non-religious programming shifted, it became CBN, then CBN Family, then the Family Channel, before being bought out by Fox and later sold to Disney. When Disney wanted to rename the channel to "XYZ" to remarket it to a different audience, it discovered that the contracts with the cable companies required that the word "Family" stay in the channel name, making this impossible. Its name may not have changed, but as evidenced by shows like Greek, Make It Or Break It, Kyle XY, and The Secret Life of the American Teenager, ABC Family isn't really that family-oriented anymore, having become a modern-day, basic cable version of the former WB network. At some point, ABC Family's motto was "Adults are family too". When you actually air a movie called Satan's School for Girls on a channel with the word '"family" in it, you are very much a "different kind of family". Today, The 700 Club (required in the original contract with Pat Robertson) and a Sunday morning/late night Infomercial block filled with megachurch pastors is the only thing left hinting at ABC Family's roots as a religious channel, and even then they've buried it at 11:00 PM with a disclaimer in front warning people (containing an unequivocal "does not reflect the views of ABC Family" due to several controversial statements that Robertson has made*
Such as agreeing with Jerry Falwell's statement that the USA invited the events of 9/11 the week of, among other things.
).
Several networks over the years gradually dumped their traditional Saturday morning blocks for more dramas, reality shows, soaps, and news. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, five of the six broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and The WB, but not UPN) had the entire 6:00 AM to Noon block of Saturdays set aside just for animated programs and other programs appealing to people of all ages, with FOX and The WB even going so far as to add in an extra two to three hours every weekday morning and afternoon, as well. Now, only The CW maintains a full-length Saturday morning block (and even then, it's made by 4Kids Entertainment, which is almost never a good sign). NBC, CBS, and ABC have shortened theirs to the three-hour minimum required by federal mandates and putting little effort into them — ABC's block is all Disney Channel and Disney XD reruns, along with a Power Rangers hour that several affiliates (like WISN in Milwaukee and KOCO in Oklahoma City) put in early-morning timeslots or refused to air the shows at all; NBC and CBS' blocks are filled mostly with preschool shows made by other companies; and FOX (which, like UPN, was able to avoid the federal mandates by exploiting loopholes) has abandoned its Saturday-morning animation block altogether, airing infomercials instead (though a few affiliates, and even some O&Os, don't bother to take it since the money goes to FOX).
There are three main reasons for the decay of Saturday-morning blocks. The first was increasing cable competition, particularly from Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and the Disney Channel, which could air kids' shows at all hours of the day rather than be constrained to one morning. The second cause was the mandates. Since few kids above preschool age watch strictly educational shows, there was little incentive for producers to make them, and entertainment-oriented shows like The Weird Al Show were compromised by constant Executive Meddling to fit the mandates. Finally, FCC regulations, voluntary guidelines, and parents' and teachers' groups have rebuilt the wall between advertising and children's entertainment, killing the lucrative Merchandise Driven cartoons that dominated The Eighties and hamstringing the traditional Saturday-morning advertisers (cereal, food, and toy companies) so much that it's too expensive for them to advertise on television anymore without disclaiming everything or trying to somehow impart that their cereal is healthy or their toy is educational in some way. It's much cheaper for them to put up a website for their product and go after them that way.
The same FCC regulations prohibited the host of a kid's show from endorsing a toy or a cereal, resulting in the extinction of local kid's shows with a live host, as it no longer made economic sense to pay someone to host a show instead of just showing all cartoons. The longest holdout is probably the original Bozo show on WGN in Chicago, which ended in 2001; the last four years though were Bozo having to wedge in boring tours of Chicago landmarks and factory tours into the show to get the E/I bug on the screen.
The British satellite station Bravo (unrelated to the American Bravo mentioned above) began as a channel showing black and white TV from the 1960s (mostly Lew Grade action shows), dropped this in favour of Speculative Fiction and horror, dumped that for True Crime shows and "adult programming", and in the end of its run showed an eclectic mix of programmes that could best be described as "lad's mag/men's magazine television". In other words, the British version of Spike TV, right down to them both showing TNA Wrestling and UFC as the big draws. It also ran sci-fi repeats (mainly Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Enterprise), in what was possibly the same effect as mentioned elsewhere when it was noticed that the demographics were similar to their other programmes.
In a related case to both Bravo UK and ABC Family, the UK version of the Family Channel eventually reduced itself within four years into constant "Family Challenge" game show marathons before giving up the pretence and rebranding itself as Challenge TV, the British equivalent of the Game Show Network. As further decay on that genre, it then later starting showing poker tournament blocks and along with it films like Casino, but the block has since been dropped. The sale of both Challenge and Bravo to Sky in 2010 and Bravo's subsequent closure in 2011 meant that Challenge is now the home of TNA Wrestling. Not to mention that as the years go on, Challenge's library of programs seems to get smaller. As of current, it looks like they are not showing any program older than 1990. Makes it rather annoying if you are a fan of a show such as Bullseye and wish to see any episodes from the early 80s through to 1989.
Imparja was created to service indigenous Australians in Central Australia, but, thanks to network aggregation, it is now essentially Channel Nine from Sydney with a couple of breakaway programmes.
Australian examples are rare because there are so few networks, most of them are owned by the same companies, and the ratings are too small to quibble about (if the most watched programme in Australian pay TV history got 419,000 viewers, how's the How To Channel supposed to gain any?). The only notable example is Fox Kids, which adopted a programming block called Fox Classics (not entirely unlike Nick At Nite) before the Fox Kids block moved to Fox8, leaving Fox Classics to absorb the entire network.
UK Gold went from a mix of the BBC and Thames archives, to suffering the same "six months ago is classic" syndrome the US "classic" TV channels seem to have suffered, with a sprinkling of fairly recent Hollywood films and repeats of Prison Break. It's now been split into the backronymed G.O.L.D. ("Go On, Laugh Daily"), a comedy channel mostly recycling all the same old shows that are always repeated...and Watch, which takes the rest of the "classic" output of UK Gold and mixes it with Richard and Judy.
Centric used to be called BET Jazz and focused on, believe it or not, jazz. Concerts, videos, wonderful old Panoram films, occasional spoken-word programs, and pretty much nothing else, 24/7. The revamped version is mostly talk shows and general-interest programming aimed at a relatively mature African-American audience; the little music they play is Caribbean or soul.
In Latin America, Infinito was a cable channel that used to show documentaries about conspiracy theories, UFOs, Atlantis, Global Warming (before it became mainstream), alternative medicine, and related stuff. Suddenly, in the mid-2000s, the channel started to mutate into a really bad Travel Channel wannabe, showcasing documentaries about New Age society, alternative lifestyles, Feng Shui, and spas which no one cares about. By 2009, it had completely ditched its original concept revolving around alternative sciences, and marketed itself as a serious documentary channel about crimes, the human mind, and historical tidbits. Then it started to decay again in mid-2009, when it started to showcase movies based on Real Life stories and events. As of January 2012, it rarely showcases documentaries, and most of its programming consists on films based on Real Life events and shows from Spike TV.
Space originally showed both subtitled and dubbed movies before it became an all-dubbed channel (like what TNT used to be).
The Spanish cable channel Buzz was once focused on anime, and one of the few, if not the only place in Spain to ever show Seinens and subbed anime. Then they started showing more unrelated stuff (Western animated shows? Sure. Extreme sports? Uh...), and for a while the only anime-related thing they aired was (according to the cable provider's TV Guide) Hentai movies on weekends...and then, eventually, even those were removed.
Toon Disney started out as the Alternate Company Equivalent to Cartoon Network, airing animated shows from the Disney archive (and some that they had acquired, mostly from Dic Entertainment). Then, they started airing a growing number of non-Disney cartoons (including some from their arch-rival, Warner Bros.), and the Jetix block, which featured shows like Power Rangers, Digimon, The Tick, and Jackie Chan Adventures, started eating up a growing chunk of the channel's airtime. Live-action shows and movies started appearing on the network, mirroring Cartoon Network's decay. Finally, last year, Toon Disney was renamed Disney XD (which means "eXtreme Digital") and turned into a network aimed at young boys. In other words, it finally became Jetix in all but name — in the process, dropping a significant portion of its remaining animated content to cram in episodes of The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, Even Stevens, and Zeke And Luther.
The rebranding does have positive aspects though. Disney XD has the rights to both The Spectacular Spider Man and Naruto Shippuden, two shows that were abandoned by decaying networks and might have been lost forever. Other shows with similar Periphery Demographics are rumored to follow. Then there's rumors of a new vault Toon Disney in the works with the hope that three kids channels will be enough to spread the love.
FOX would've avoided all this if they hadn't sold their successful "Fox Kids" lineup (which aired Power Rangers, Spider-Man: The Animated Series, Digimon, and others) to Disney/ABC via the Fox Family network. They then retooled their Saturday-morning lineup into the "Fox Box", which consisted almost entirely of 4Kids Macekres. Naturally, they lampshaded this by changing the lineup's name to "4Kids TV"...then, of course, replacing Saturday-morning kids' shows with infomercials.
In some other countries, Jetix is its own channel. For whatever reason, Disney decided that it would be better to append it as a programming block onto a network it has nothing to do with, and then let it swallow the network whole.
Funny thing — in Latin America, "Jetix" is what Fox Kids mutated into. After Disney bought Fox Kids when Saban went down the toilet, they renamed it Jetix, dumped all of their programming, and started from scratch. However, they still show TheFairly OddParents (one of the last shows Fox Kids ever aired, and which was also seen on Disney Channel until mid-2009), various Power Rangers shows (who were on Fox Kids to begin with down here), and the "Super Hora" block of Marvel Comics cartoons (The Incredible Hulk, X-Men, and Spider-Man Unlimited).
In Eastern Europe, Fox Kids became Jetix, dumping most of the Fox Original cartoons, but retaining Disney originals and anime adaptations, like Shaman King, eventually airing a few original shows, such as Galactik Football and Oban Star Racers. By late 2009, it mutated again into a straight-up Disney Channel, dumping the old Jetix shows and replacing them with regular Disney Channel broadcast.
Australia had the Jetix programming block on the Seven Network for a short time, vanishing just as quietly as it emerged.
The NBC Sports Network, formally Versus and originally the Outdoor Life Network (licensed from a magazine of the same name), originally focused on outdoorsy stuff like hunting and fishing. Then their annual coverage of the Tour de France became popular, due to Lance Armstrong's utter dominance of the event with seven yellow jackets in a row. They then acquired the rights to the NHL, a sport which is not played outdoors (these days at least, although they've recently started having an outdoor "Winter Classic" each year). Around the same time, they started to focus on extreme sports and college sports (although stuck with only covering lower-tier games from conferences in the western half of the country despite being based out of Philadelphia {because the Worldwide Leader got almost everything else}, and out of New England prior to that), resulting in a name change to Versus. In 2012, following a merger with NBC and Comcast, Versus was rebranded as the NBC Sports Network to become a 24 hour cable extension of NBC Sports, and perhaps to directly compete with ESPN. Low-brow programming such as Groin Attack clip shows and Sports Soup was abandoned the moment NBC took over.
The rebranding does have positive aspects. Once neglected and obscure sports like the NHL and the UFC, has received much better exposure and viewership since they aired on the network, with the latter being able to get a lucrative deal with FOX as a result. Soccer fans are hoping NBC can do the same thing with their sport with the network receiving the rights to MLS games. In addition, NBC plans to use the network for their Olympic coverage to present more live events. Considering NBC's previous tendencies to broadcast events Live But Delayed, fans had approval for the decision.
The TV Guide Channel, formerly the Preview Guide or Prevue Channel. Originally, it was a nice little channel that gave the local TV listings and the weather, along with unobtrusive text ads, using Teletext-style graphics set to music from a local radio station. About a year later, it added Muzak and dedicated half of the screen to trailers with the rare show (or whatever the cable company wanted to advertise). It was later bought by TV Guide, which mutated it into the tabloid channel it is today. When TV Guide took over, the listings were pushed down to the bottom half of the screen so as to make more room to show talking heads blab about reality shows, awards ceremonies, and whatever Britney did. When Lionsgate acquired the network in 2009, the listings were removed altogether, prompting a few cable companies to drop the channel; although this has since been reversed. It could be argued that this change was made to compete with Internet channel listings and the electronic program guide features available with satellite and digital cable packages (which allow viewers to scroll through the listings at will and select channels from the menu).
Fine Living Network, a sibling to Food Network and HGTV, was revamped into Cooking Channel on May 31, 2010 (though Fine Living already showed some food-related programming). By the time of the overhaul, "Fine Living" didn't really fit its name, as much of its programming consisted of shows that used to/should be on Food Network or HGTV, things which made the "fine" in the name seem superfluous (if you take it to mean "of high quality", though the word has myriad meanings).
To clarify, Scripps Networks (parent of Food Network, HGTV, and DIY among others) launched Fine Living as an upscale lifestyle-oriented network, with emphasis on the upscale (thus the "fine"). It was basically a classy version of Food Network/HGTV and Travel Channel rolled into one. There were a lot of shows about wine and entertaining, travel to exotic locales, and the home decor/gardening shows definitely didn't have low budgets in mind. Somewhere along the line it fell victim to the usual problems, and became a dumping ground for shows from the other Scripps networks. Its decay can probably be traced right back to Food Network and HGTV's decay, but it was also a victim of bad timing more than anything, with the economy tanking (though the slide began before then). When people's McMansions are being foreclosed on, they probably don't give a crap about hosting parties in them, and showing a program literally called I Want That! in a recession is probably not a good idea. Given how badly Food Network sucks now, though, the retool of this network might be a blessing in disguise. That said, someone still seems to think there's a market for the original concept, but don't remind anyone with HD cable service of that fact. Along with Mav TV and any outdoor channel producing content for pennies, Wealth TV is a major Berserk Button channel since it takes a slot that could air actual programming more than 21 people in a service area would watch...and instead airs inane programming that appeals to a very select few.
Lone Star was a Canadian cable channel that showed nothing but westerns (movies and old TV shows) when it first started in 2001. After several years, it added non-western action movies to its lineup, until they dominated the schedule. In 2008, the station rebranded itself as Movie Time. The American equivalent, Encore Westerns on the other hand hasn't decayed by design, since it's part of the Starz premium package that you pay extra for to get a channel devoted to westerns.
DIY Network started out as a channel which had wonderful programming which laid out projects step by step in such diverse genres as knitting, scrapbooking, car care, basic home maintenance, and larger projects. However as the years have gone by the instructional programming has been pushed off to accommodate the shows on HGTV's schedule which didn't fit the "Buy, buy, buy! Remodel, remodel, remodel! Redecorate all you want, the fun times never end!" programming model that was at its worst at the height of the housing bubble. Currently it's a mix of those older shows, along with shallow and inaccessible programming designed to appeal to the "king of the castle" guy like Cool Tools, and programs consisting entirely of outdated tips spewed out by rent-a-spokesmen on the "Today Show''.
ESPNEWS was created specifically so you could get scores and highlights in a half-hour (or much less if you just looked at the much more detailed ticker) without any SportsCenter gimmickry and annoying segments like "Play of the Day", (Sliver-Canned National Light Beer Manufactured in the Rocky Mountain Region of Colorado) Cold Hard Facts which pretty much existed to give short shrift to lower-tier teams who didn't have any highlights in their games, at least according to those in Bristol. Now that the ticker was replaced with the glacial regular flavor ESPN "bottom line" ticker and the regular SportsCenter gimmicks have moved over to ESPNEWS, not to mention that SportsCenter is now being used as the network's primetime branding, it's pretty much "SportsCenter 24/7'' but with the network's F-team anchors.
Animax (supposed to be a 24-hour anime channel)'s Latin American side, both Brazilian and Spanish-speaking versions, is this. The first slip and the most egregious example — its cycle of movies appropriately named "Reciclo", since it recycled all the action flicks already worn by repetition in other channels of the Sony Group, like AXN. The only remotely anime-related movie shown there was Tokyo Godfathers...and they had repeated Hellboy and The Fifth Element each six weeks or so since its inception. Then they added series such as Lost, Blood Ties, and The Middle Man (with the Brazilian side also having infomercials at odd hours), canned a slew of top-rated series, such as Death Note and Neon Genesis Evangelion, and inserted a concert block for Latin American performers. Then in May 2010, the channel announced that it would shift its focus to an overall youth programming, thus warranting his place in Total Abandonment. After that they were still broadcasting 12 hours of anime (13 during weekends). Five months later, anime was only 5 hours, starting at 2 AM. Aaand just two months later (December 2010) they announced that anime will be gone entirely by March 2011, following by a name change later in May - the channel is now known as "Sony Spin". Animax RIP 2006-11.
Before Animax LA was owned by Sony, it had other name, Locomotion. Originally a children oriented channel, but later became a youth oriented channel a year later to avoid competition with Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, and shortly after an adult oriented animation channel (it showed things like Æon Flux, The Maxx, The Head, the Prince Valiant movies and Wallace & Gromit shorts, among others), eventually it evolved into an anime channel (showing more than 10 anime series a day), so it started calling itself "the anime channel". The problem is that after a while it stopped showing animes at all, crowded with other programs (of quality) like Duck Man, South Park or The Critic. Eventually, it created an advertisement that said "The good anime, takes time. Anime-station". Did this mean they were going to add more anime in the future? Watchers were really confused by this.*
It turned out they sold their rights to an anime channel
Eventually this lead to the channel being rebranded to Animax, and later to Sony Spin.
Animax South Africa followed the same disastrous was as Latin America's and Spain's. Japanese animation is now almost in the minority and are few and far between, as reality shows have taken over the schedule, and was soon closed down to make way for a new channel, Sony Max, which basically airs the same reality shows that aired on Animax South Africa.
Animax Spain is following the same disastrous way as Latin American's and South Africa's. Japanese animation is now almost in the minority (they only broadcast either very old series like Kochikame or Lupin III, or commercial successes like Inuyasha or Naruto). 90% of Animax Spain consists now of low-budget live-action series like Primeval, Samurai Girl, Torchwood, or Reaper, or bland, soulless "young adult" TV shows like In The Qbe or Insert Coin. They even have earned the moniker of "Yankeemax" amongst Spanish otakus (similarly, the LA version has been called "Gringomax" by Mexicans and other South American folk).
Television New Zealand (TVNZ) since the late 1980s (specifically TV1 and TV2) went from a mainly BBC-style license fee-funded model to a mainly advertising-funded model - as of 2011, 90% of TVNZ's revenue was from advertising. As a result, it shifted visibly towards the lowest common denominator, and whether it's a good or a bad thing depends on one's political and economic viewpoint.
Inverted with TVNZ-6 and TVNZ-7, which were spun off from TVNZ as part of New Zealand's Freeview digital TV platform in 2008. These 2 channels were explicitly public broadcasting-oriented, in comparison with the heavily commercialised TV1 and TV2. However, a change of government and subsequent non-renewal of funding have meant TVNZ-6 has been turned into the commercial youth channel TVNZ-U, and TVNZ-7 is to go off the air for good in 2012.
You can watch decent TVNZ channels like Kidzone24 and Heartland. The catch? They're not available on TVNZ's Freeview digital network, you can only watch them if you have a subscription to pay TV operator SKY.
Discovery Kids, an outgrowth of the Discovery Channel which showed mostly educational programming similar to the fields of the parent channel, was replaced by The Hub, a channel backed by Hasbro which focuses on the company's Merchandise Driven franchises (Transformers, G.I. Joe, My Little Pony, etc.). Out of international versions, only the Latin American remains: the UK version was replaced with Discovery Turbo (cars, bikes, boats, and planes) and the Canadian one with... Nickelodeon!
Romance Classics, a rather specific Spin-Off of AMC that was geared towards women, was launched in January 1997 and aired nothing but old and cheesy romance films and Doris Day movies. By late 2000 it was decided that the channel was going nowhere, so it was blown up and overhauled into WE: Women's Entertainment, intended to be a "contemporary" counterpoint to Lifetime. It has since changed its name to WEtv and is better known for Bridezillas and other wedding-related fare (enough to fill a Spin-Off, Wedding Central, which died in July 2011 both because the wedding craze died and their parent company couldn't get anyone to carry a weddings-only channel) than anything else.
There used to be an awesome cable/satellite TV channel called Newsworld International that was owned by the Canadian Broadcasting Company (Canada's answer to the BBC), aired in the U.S. and showed all sorts of foreign TV news broadcasts, from Britain's ITV News at Ten to evening news broadcasts from Japan's NHK, Germany's Deutsche Welle, its very own CBC, etc. Then it was sold to an investment group largely owned by Al Gore and it transformed itself into the Current TV. It purports to be a 24-hour news channel for young adults (the 18-30 set), but eventually degraded into the same old mish-mash of reality shows and snark about the news you see on other general channels because of the usual problem with channels that start with a higher purpose, but have to downmarket to get ratings. And now with Keith Olbermann coming into the channel the signal is clear that Current is going after young adults of a certain political ideal above all others.
Slipped
SBS in Australia was originally created to show foreign language programmes to Australians who spoke languages other than English. Since there are so many of them (at the very least it would need to do Chinese, Italian and Greek), it couldn't dedicate itself to them all, and since pay TV services like RAI and ANT 1 launched later did it much better, it gradually became more a mix of documentaries, sex, soccer, and South Park. "SBS" is sometimes colloquially called "Sex and Bloody Soccer".
However, considering SBS still broadcasts in more languages than any other broadcaster in the world, it is somewhat absurd to say it has abandoned its original purpose completely. It continues to broadcast news programmes from dozens of foreign countries including Russia and Turkey, and it has a weekly Australian Mandarin-language news bulletin. Much of SBS's air-time contains English language programming on television, but on radio it still overwhelmingly consists on non-English-language programming.
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 overtime 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: Crime Scene Investigation.
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.
CNNHeadline 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.
Much of The History Channel's (now called "History" — if they follow Syfy's embrace of text-culture spelling, they'll soon be called Teh Hist-R-E!!!) programming now consists of roughneck-focused reality shows (Ice Road Truckers, Ax Men) and conspiracy theory "documentaries" about UFOs, the Bible Code, ghosts, Atlantis, Nostradamus, and the end of the world, earning the network the derisive nickname "The Hysterical Channel". Heck, at least the "Hitler Channel," as they used to be known (back when everything was about either World War II, Nazis or The American Civil War), was actual history. The current UFO/Bible Code/Conspiracy shows aren't history — they're paranoia.
One good reason for the network's decay is that the Smithsonian Institution, which was one of the go-to organizations for History in their early days, is now under an exclusive deal with Showtime where they produce programming around Smithsonian exhibits and properties for their exclusive Smithsonian Channel, which is not allowed to decay by design, while Showtime and CBS maintain rights to the institution's film library. Showtime of course isn't about to do anything with a competitor, thus History has to look for other ideas to fill their broadcast day.
Realising its sheer number of military programmes, including a documentary series on modern-day Canadian fighter pilots, the UK now has a Military History channel spun off from its History Channel.
The US also has a Military Channel...which also happens to fit this Trope perfectly because it used to be Discovery Wings, a network dedicated exclusively to aviation. Until the execs caught onto the fact that their most popular shows were about military aviation...
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. Though, all in all, it's still largely become "The Cancelled NBC Game Show Network", with modern shows like Deal or No Deal and 1 vs. 100 all but obliterating classic games not named Family Feud or Match Game from the lineup.
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 ofMythbusters 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 it's 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! 5Ds 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 90's.
The Weather Channel used to be all-weather all-the-time, but in recent 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.W
But not Wii. Its Forecast Channel is run by Weathernews Inc.
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Indeed, TWC was sold to NBC in order to save Landmark Communications from bankruptcy.
Ironically, it got so bad in early 2010 (Movies? Really?) that Dish Networkthreatened 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, 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*
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
, 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 manyCanadianmediaoutlets) 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, 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 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 and 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 Knoxville, Tennessee by Luken. Unreliable Sources was canned immediately and the network has resumed an almost all-classic TV lineup (besides a light talk show from one of their affiliates). However, in 2011 the network lost the rights to NBC Universal's library to competitors Me TV and Antenna TV, 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 and Me.
The Sci Fi Channel started out as a network devoted to Science Fiction shows and movies. Even when they started bringing in fantasy and horror, most fans didn't mind since these still fell under the label of "Speculative Fiction", which sci-fi was often lumped in with. Fans were even accepting when it became the "Paranormal Channel" with shows like Ghost Hunters, its numerous clones or spinoffs, and Destination Truth. It was when they started adding reality shows, Law and Order: SVU reruns, a cooking show, and, most damningly, Professional Wrestling that it really began to decay. Their name change to "Syfy" (pronounced the same way, though it looks like it could be pronounced like Sihfee) casts further doubt on their commitment (though the presence of strong Sci-fi shows kept the channel out of Total Abandonment). The executives claimed they wanted a name that could be trademarked, but most people are convinced otherwise. Their insulting explanation for the name change, in which they refer to sci-fi fans as basement dwellers and insinuated that they repulse women, went a long way toward accomplishing this.
In Canada, Sci-Fi's counterpart (called Space) manages to mostly avoid this, though they have somewhat broadened their scope to show fantasy and horror shows/movies, such as Supernatural and Relic Hunter. Still, the various Stargate Verse shows and Star Trek series constitute about 70% of what Space airs.
Syfy UK show some heavily-promoted proper science fiction series, but mostly they construct their schedule from a mix of documentaries on the supernatural/occult/alien abduction, kung fu movies, MMA, action series (such as Human Target), frequent Buffy the Vampire Slayer, disaster movies, monster movies, sword-and-sandals, medieval adventure movies (First Knight and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves? Seriously?), all kinds of fantasy, and quirky dramas like Eli Stone. It's rare to see a genuinely science fiction movie on there, unless you count Nutty Professor II: The Klumps on last week. Syfy UK seems to following the American network's trend with the announcement that they will be showing MMA promotion BAMMA however.
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.
Studio example — in the later Weinstein-run years, arthouse distributor Miramax Films began distributing "mainstream" films like She's All That. Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back made fun of this — "Once Miramax made She's All That, everything went to hell." Heck, there were even complaints of decay even before that. Miramax (and the Weinsteins) was responsible for the constant Hellraiser and Children of the Corn sequels along with the infamous Arabian Knight cut of The Thief and the Cobbler.
You have to give it to Disney — they're at least honest about knowing when an entire genre is decaying, and have announced that because of both the fading influence of Soap Operas and the fact you can now click over to a network website or flip on your cable on demand service to catch up on a soap anytime rather than waiting to record it Sunday morning at 4:00 AM, SOAP Net will be replaced with Disney Junior, the new name for Disney's preschool shows (now Playhouse Disney) by 2012. Better that they announce the decay now and get everyone prepared than just letting it wither on the vine.
Unfortunately however, it led to the shocking cancellation of both All My Children and One Life to Live under the Brian Frons excuse that without SOAP Net airings, the shows would be too expensive to produce without a cable channel component, a theory which quickly held no water with the soap community and just sounded like a way of saying 'airing talk shows is cheaper than running a year-long soap'.
Admittedly, though, the network has always been a tenuous project, as anything except Being Erica that isn't soap or Gilmore Girls-marathon related has never done well at all for the channel, since it's usually treated as the Island of Misfit Reality Programs that both ABC and ABC Family rejected and only picked up to make existing producers happy or stop a format that might do well in another iteration from escaping to another network. Also, it's been proven over time that there's only a limited amount of interest in old soap episodes from canceled programs — nobody's willing to catch up on Ryan's Hope episodes from April 1975, except for unexpected Period Piece curiosity.
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.
The Oxygen Network, a channel geared toward women like the Lifetime Channel, has recently aired the movie Bad Boys II.
Planet Green replaced Discovery Home as a channel which was intended to jump on the trend of 'going green' in 2008 by airing a schedule of programming solely involving green and environmental programming. However the economic meltdown and people angered because Discovery threw off all the Home programming without placing it anywhere (only Holmes On Homes remains, and that's because HGTV Canada produces it and the US HGTV took it the moment Discovery stopped carrying it), pretty much made programming a network about a lifestyle that required lots of that other kind of "green" to maintain untenable for the long run. A couple of non-green programs snuck on the schedule in 2009, and because of the incredible viewer apathy the network receives even among green enthusiasts, it's pretty well on the road to ruin only three years after its launch. Their original shows after the first year now have very little to almost no relation to the environment at all, such as a show about Canadian restaurants run by prisoners on work release and ex-cons. The most mentionable being about two buisness executives learning how to run a farm from the internet.
With the ratings very low, it's now airing shows about oil drilling in North Dakota and the people lucky enough to make money from it (no, that's not green at all), programs about UFOs (little "green" men landing on a "planet"? Does that count?), a series about loggers who use helicopters to collect lumber (chopping down trees is "green" now?), ghost stories, and reruns of stuff Discovery has aired to death on their other networks, but can't air after other network conversions (historical documentaries that used to air on Discovery Times, which is now Investigation Discovery, for instance). Meanwhile, the actual "green" programming was stuck in the middle of the night and completely ignored (as of 2012 the shows are completely gone), while the network's logo has been recolored red. And now Discovery's CEO has even said the channel is on life support.
In 2012, they began to devote their Wednesday nights to shows airing police chase shows regurgitated from shows that aired years ago, and a horrible Parking Wars clone involving hit-and-run wrecks, about as far as you can get from environmentally conscious. The only thing "green" about these programs is the recycling of old footage and the remains of said salvaged felony wrecks.
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.
Logo, an LGBT-centered channel, a problem with finding memorable shows that are relevant after inexplicably cancelling its two highest rated shows (Noah's Arc, a soap opera about gay men of color, and Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World, an animated satire)...so it seems they'd rather just go with popular stuff instead, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and only showing clips in ads of Willow and Tara, and hype it up like it's the premise. They also aired Thelma & Louise, even though it's just about two straight women evading the law. But now they're also showing Daria, to which there's nothing directly or indirectly mentioning homosexuality except for a bi girl who flirts with Jane in the first TV movie. The fact that all three shows have heavy servings of Les Yay offer some arguable justification, but not much.
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 TJ 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.
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 The 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.
Major Shifts That Fit
Discovery HD Theater was rebranded as the auto-focused Velocity Network. It still fits because they show a bunch of car-related programming, like Chasing Classic Cars, Wheeler Dealers, and World Rally Championship coverage, and is a good rebranding now that networks that are just pure demonstrations of HD programming on a constant loop are no longer needed.
Nickelodeon. Over the years, the network has severely narrowed its demographic by increments. It originally prided itself as being essentially a family network, with an emphasis on programming for children in the daytime (preschoolers in the early morning on weekdays), teens in early evening, and parents at night. Now, however, most (if not all) of the teen and adult programming (SNICK, Nick At Nite, and the last vestiges of children's game shows, just to name a few) has been dumped in favor of cartoon-y cartoons and tween/preteen "hip" live action series (and about 12 hours of SpongeBob reruns daily). The worst and most obvious example of this is the recent live action show on the so-called "TEENick" lineup (which retains only one or two shows about/directed towards actual teenagers), The Naked Brothers Band, which essentially is a Hannah Montana ripoff about two 9-year-old boys. Really.
Interestingly, you can see how Nick was trying so intensely to narrow down the age of people watching the network when you look at the failure of shows like Invader Zim. And by "failure", we really mean "it was being watched primarily by teens and college kids, not the 6-11 year olds that Viacom wanted." Avatar: The Last Airbender would've gone the same way as Zim if it weren't for the fact that it was just as popular with the target age as it was with the teens (and the college kids, and the adults). Even then, the network seemed to resent the attention it got from older viewers, as new episodes came out at a snail's pace and reruns are almost never shown now that the show has ended (possibly in part because of having an actual plot, instead of being episodic like most cartoons). (They've shown reruns in recent days, but more to promote the film adaptation than for anything like ratings.)
Nicktoons Network dumped showing of older or cancelled Nicktoons such as Angry Beavers, Doug, Ren and Stimpy, Rugrats, Hey Arnold!, Invader Zim, etc. in favor of showing reruns of the exact same shows playing on Nickelodeon, just a few channels away. Lately however, it's even been getting rid of more recent Nicktoons and replacing them with standardized superhero adaptations and bizarre Infomercial programming consisting of cheap Flash cartoons for the NFL and a Skechers kid's shoe line...and live-action programming. The "Nicktoons Comedy Breakfast" seems to exist solely to keep reruns of Drake & Josh, The Troop, and Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide on the air technically without dragging down the ratings on the mother channel.
Another Nick spinoff, Nick GAS (Games and Sports), was formerly a dumping ground for Nick's aforementioned children's game shows and game/sports-themed shows, along with original segments dealing with kids and their games and sports — basically, Viacom's answer to GSN. And like the former Game Show Network, GAS slowly lost programs until, by the end, it was only airing reruns of a few old Nick games, having lost all of the original segments and programming. It was finally replaced with the teen-oriented "The N", formerly part of the now just-for-preschoolers Noggin, a switch which now leaves millions of college kids without reruns of Legends of the Hidden Temple to sarcastically comment about.*
(At least one of our Tropers used to gamble on it with some friends. Nothing as satisfying as winning $30 off the Orange Iguanas, apparently.)
Naturally, "The N" itself quickly decayed, with a mass-canning of much of their teen/young adult oriented programming (such as South Of Nowhere and Instant Star), and devoting an increasing amount of airtime to old Nickelodeon shows, other Disney Channel-esque tween fare, and reruns of UPN stalwart One on One because it can be run for pennies per airing. A special mention goes out to the way they treated Degrassi: The Next Generation — The N's broadcasts had always been bowdlerized, the most infamous example being when they refused to air an episode about abortion for fear of offending the Moral Guardians. It Got Worse when the show started becoming really popular in America, putting The N in a position to force creative changes onto the show that served to turn it from a fairly realistic (if hyper-melodramatic) depiction of teenage life into a clone of The O.C..
Then in a two-for-one decay, the TEENick block got dumped from Nickelodeon proper while The N is being renamed "TeenNick"...and less than two years on the air TeenNick is already on life support. With only one series showing new episodes, TeenNick's problem is that they have too little shows they are willing to show and the ones they do show are rerun into the ground, which mainly consists of continuous marathon-like re-runs of a small handful of mid-2000s tween Nickelodeon shows. In particular, Zoey 101, which is shown on the network at least seven times a day, even though only one actress from that show (Victoria Justice) has an actual career these days. The network's other favorites after Degrassi and Zoey tend to change once in a while. As of this writing, Drake & Josh and The Amanda Show seem to be the other favorite children of TeenNick's shows. It doesn't help that they will re-run the same episodes multiple times over a three-day span. Occasionally, they'll add shows to the schedule and give them bigpromotion during commercialbreaks, but theysoon disappear aftera month or so. All TeenNick has going for it is Degrassi and The '90s Are All That, but even then that's completely reruns. Very ironic when you think this channel replaced Nick GAS, TeenNick took much quicker to decay than Nick GAS did.
"The N" used to share a programming half with "Noggin", which used to be about education for young people. That demo got younger and younger until now it's for 3-5 year olds (and itself has bitten the bullet and renamed itself Nick Jr.), while others insist Noggin decayed when Sesame Workshop sold their share of the network back to Viacom...a sale which threw The Electric Company, 3-2-1 Contact, Ghostwriter, and pre-1990s episodes of Sesame Street off the air.
Nick At Nite started out as the after-dark portion of Nickelodeon, where they showed decades-old TV shows (The Munsters, I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show)...but as time went on it began adding shows that were ten years old or less (Roseanne, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and The George Lopez Show) and eventually changed their motto to "The Place for Modern TV Hits", airing such shows as Scrubs, Everybody Hates Chris, and Glenn Martin DDS (and the last isn't even that). Arguably the shift began with the 1995 addition of Taxi, the most relatively modern and, more importantly, edgy show the network had broadcast up to that point. This is mostly due to Nickelodeon fully taking over programming duty for Nick At Nite (now spelled as Nick@Nite) and re-purposing the network as a family block, offloading the classic TV programming to TV Land (see Slipped, above). Of course, the lines are blurring between Nickelodeon and Nick@Nite in terms of promotion and some speculate Nick@Nite might soon disappear.
One of the key issues is that it always showed reruns. Also, if you look at it from a relative time standpoint, it's not so bad — in the late 1980s, the lineup was dedicated to the 1960s-70s; the 1990s lineup had shows from the 1970s-80s; and the 2000s had mostly shows from the 1990s. Today, it's not that surprising to see shows from the 1990s and 2000s...which would be fine if they showed eight or nine separate shows a night, instead of a one show a night, of a rotating lineup of about four shows. More recently, Nick@Nite is heading towards becoming The George Lopez Show At Nite by giving the show Wolverine Publicity. Nearly every marathon they air now is of George Lopez, and they don't even save marathons for holidays and special occasions anymore. First they would look for any excuse they could find to show a George Lopez marathon, until they recently stopped bothering to come up with an excuse. Lopez reruns probably even did in George Lopez's TBS talk show eventually in August 2011, as the sitcom often outrated the talk show.
The Latin American version of Nick@Nite suffered this as well, originally aired shows old shows like Get Smart, Bewitched, and I Dream Of Jeannie, then it added newer shows like Fresh Prince than Kenan And Kel and finally Zoey 101 (Which still aired in ""regular" Nick) God knows why. However when it started airing fresh Prince a new block called Nick Hits debuted on the Nick@Nite timeslot during weekends which contained old Nick Toons like Rocko's and Rocket Power. So finally Nick hits became Nick@Nite and all the old shows stopped airing
Cuatro TV in Spain once prided themselves in that they were "the only pure TV channel in Spain", offering "just TV series and made-for TV shows, no movies, no reality shows, no celebrity gossip shows." Now they have movies, reality shows, and celebrity gossip shows. Welp. Since their name is so generic (it means "The Fourth", like Das Vierte below) they got away with a major shift without invalidating their name.
The Disney Channel originally had a lineup of vintage Disney movies, cartoons, and TV shows, combined with original documentaries about the company's various projects, a lot of interesting imported shows (especially from Canada), and such programming for adults as A Prairie Home Companion. But as it lost ground to Nickelodeon in The Nineties, it started to focus more and more on kids. It shoved most of the vintage programs aside, interspersing about three hours of cartoons at 1:00 AM with hours and hours of QVC-type hawking of Disney merchandise (Minnie Mouse tea set, only three payments of $11.95!) and...Guns N' Roses concerts...on Disney Channel? *
(The worst part was that, originally, the Disney Channel was a premium cable service like HBO or Cinemax, and unlike Nickelodeon which was basic-cable from its conception. With Nickelodeon entering its golden age just as Disney was hitting a low point in programming quality, the only way to stop mass cancellation of subscriptions was to move it to basic-cable. Nickelodeon actually forced the Walt Disney Corporation to change a business model.)
It abandoned Vault Disney, The Ink and Paint Club, and most other broadcasts of classic Disney cartoons and shows in order to turn into a preppy, suburban tween-oriented network whose M.O. seems to be "promote every last one of our child stars as the next great actor/singer/songwriter/dancer/Idol Singer". However, the reason why this isn't under Total Abandonment is because it isn't quite network decay, but rather, a reflection of what some entities owned by Disney itself have become in the last several years, making this more of a case of slight (but not complete) Company Decay. And admittedly, it's a very powerful marketing tool for its mother company.
The Playboy Channel probably goes here, in that it's still showing naked people. Originally, the channel showed video Playmate layouts and short, tasteful softcore movies that sometimes actually had well-written, endearing stories. Much like the original's Magazine Decay, the channel's kept the sex and lost the class, and now shows (randomly renamed) hardcore movies and a near-endless barrage of "reality" shows, including more than one that could be described as "Big Brother where they show the sex".
The homogenization of BET (Black Entertainment Television) following its sale to Viacom (which didn't correspond to an increase in production values) led to its decline. They canned their news programs, and started to be more restrictive as to what and who they play on their music block. Back in The Nineties, it was easy for you to be seen on BET if you were black and MTV refused to play you. Nowadays, groups like Public Enemy and NWA (to say nothing of Alternative Hip Hop acts like A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul, or black rock acts like Bad Brains and Living Colour) wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell of being played on BET if they had gotten started today. Mostly because the network has a policy of not wanting to play music that's deemed too intelligent, relevant, creative, or over the heads of teenagers (specifically teenage girls). It's become a perfect representation of the modern, hyper-commercialized rap scene, which is more interested in selling ringtones than actually creating art.
Recently, BET has stopped playing videos that were made prior to 2005 (before that it was 2001!). They use to play old-school vids from The Eighties and The Nineties on 106 & Park's Old School Jam of the Day, but this has since been turned into the Flashback of the Day, showing vids that were only a couple of years old. 106 & Park's VJs (Free and AJ) even lampshaded this, and their vocal criticism of BET's direction is believed to be part of the reason why they were let go. The more conspiratorial-minded feel that BET is trying to bury old-school hip-hop.
As of 2010, BET started airing re-runs of many black sitcoms of the past decade like Smart Guy, The Bernie Mac Show, and Everybody Hates Chris to follow the mini-marathon formats most current cable networks utilize. BET also started producing series of their own, like Let's Stay Together and more seasons of The Game after its cancellation from the CW, and even its own late-night talk show block with The Monique Show and Wendy Williams Show. The music has mostly been eliminated outside of 106 and Park, but with the increased focus on the internet and their site being a jumping point for music, at least they have a good reason.
Two banned episodes of The Boondocks (you can watch 'em on DVD) bash BET's decay for all it's worth. The irony here is that the Executive Producer "Reginald Hudlin" in the credits is the same one who currently runs BET. Contractual obligations keep his name on it, but series creator Aaron McGruder has made his stance on the network clear. "Martin Luther King Jr." called out the network in one episode, and shortly afterwards, the former president of the network killed himself.
To watch the Travel Channel, you'd think the only reason to travel would be to play poker, to find ghosts, or most importantly, to try the unusual, sometimes disgusting, local foods. See Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, Food Paradise, and Man v. Food. One has to wonder if Travel Channel wishes they were Food Network for gluttons. No doubt a program of the most haunted restaurants with the best/strangest cuisine would be the ultimate fusion for both. Eventually they were bought by Food Network's parent company in 2010.
Food Network began with cooking shows and has branched out into contests and reality shows...but every single one of these still has to do heavily with food and fits the network and every new personality has a background in the culinary arts.
Lifetime Television used to be the health/medical channel, or at least on Sundays. A third-party company bought the entire Sunday schedule to air shows they produced about such things as open-heart surgery, not just for educating the public but intended for medical professionals. There was plenty of stuff for women (nutrition, childbirth, etc.), but then the deal expired and the shows were simply dropped as the network moved to being "television for women" all the time and kind of a joke in the industry — all its shows seemed to revolve around women becoming independent, not because it's cool but because men are brutal and have Testosterone Poisoning. This decay has been on so long that most people forget it wasn't always the home of execrable made-for-TV movies that prey on the fears of middle-aged suburban housewives.
The Latin American version of Discovery Kids began broadcasting in the late 1990s with either edutainment shows (like Ghost Writer), ecology shows that didn't quite fit on Discovery Channel, or science shows mainly geared to early teens and adolescents (i.e., Popular Mechanics for Kids)...however, the number of older fans was dwindling and unable to support the channel. Then, in the early 2000s, somebody noticed a market gap with preschooler shows being limited to the mornings and it underwent an extreme shift towards the toddler and kindergarten demographics, much to the chagrin of older fans. Currently, the channel airs preschool fare like LazyTown, Hi-5, Backyardigans, My Little Pony Friendship Is MagicBarney.
In Mexico, the children's channel ZAZ is a case of "bad for some, good for others". The channel was launched on 1991 as a children's showcase station, even airing shows from Nickelodeon when that channel was still unknown on the region. On 1996 the channel was expanded into all of Latin America, and was refocused into a "non-violent" channel with shows like Arthur, Muppet Babies, Fraggle Rock, etc. staying with that format for over a decade. Somewhere in 2003 they started to focus in showcasing family movies, but in 2008 it was decided that the "non-violent" purpose of the channel was "out" so they trashed it. First they started airing an Argentinian teen soap opera called Rebelde Way, which clearly is not for young kids. In 2009, the channel began airing anime, but since kids' networks generally won't air that, it was welcomed with all the love in the world by anime fans who had no interest in the channel and prior to this change considered ZAZ a stupid channel with bad shows aimed at idiots. Rebelde Way has since been dropped from the channel, and, in a twist of irony, the channel hasn't premiered any new anime series since January 2010, and has actually cancelled some of them, so the programming is becoming repetitive, much to the chagrin of those who welcomed the channel's new concept in 2009, until the channel went off the air (this time for good) in February 2012. The channel also made commercials mocking its old "non-violent" profile, stating that they were more cool, less geeky.
HGTV (Home and Garden Television) has a fairly broad umbrella of topics. It still features seasonal specials about over-the-top Christmas and Halloween decoration, but for the most part it's dropped most of its quirkier programming, shows such as "What's With That House?" about odd houses and the eccentrics who built them, "If Walls Could Talk," featuring unusual stories about old homes people have renovated, or "House Detective" where a home inspector visits a home people bought without an inspection and tells them what idiots they are. They've also discontinued most of their gardening, DIY, and specialist design shows ("Spice Up My Kitchen," "Mission:Organization") in favor of more general shows which focus on a designer rather than a specific space. The station devotes increasingly large blocks of time to what could as easily be called Real Estate TV, shows which follow a format where potential home buyers see three or four homes and then buy one. But technically even those shows still deal with the H in HGTV, so as homogenized as the network has become, it still hasn't gone completely off the rails.
Temporary Shifts
Reversed by a recent trend of "vault" cable networks that went and defined a niche for themselves, when they used to be little more than rerun farms. TNT has repurposed itself as being the drama network, complete with the slogan "We Know Drama"; TBS wants you to know that everything they show is "Very Funny"; and USA has made a point of acquiring programs that showcase quirky characters to fit its "Characters Welcome" campaign.
These networks also frequently show movies that don't fit the theme — comedies like Galaxy Quest and Men in Black on TNT, dramas like the Lord of the Rings on TBS — but the ads present them as the network's genre; USA's broader "Characters Welcome" focus, and their knack for showing movies that fit the genre of their shows, lets them better avert this.
CBC faces a balancing act between popular American shows, which draw advertisers, and Canadian content, which tends to be less popular. Lately, it's made a larger push to get new Canadian shows on the air (Little Mosque on the Prairie, Being Erica, and so on) but you can still catch re-runs of The Simpsons. Yet the station's management still refuses to adapt shows produced by its French counterpart Radio-Canada...
ZTV, who was originally established as a Swedish alternative of MTV, pretty much went down the same line as MTV. In a brave attempt to counter this, however, in 2006 they decided to split the channel up; ZTV would go back to its musical roots, and the new channel TV6 would focus on the programs that had made ZTV decay. Both channels still exist to this day, and neither has decayed.
Similar thing happened in Finland. Just replace ZTV with The Voice and TV 6 with Vii5i. Except it was zigzagged;TV Viisi originally occupied the slot, which was replaced by The Voice in 2004. In 2008 the original channel, renamed Vii5i, started sharing the channel slot. In 2011 the channels were splitted to separate slots.
MSNBC started as a joint venture between NBC and Microsoft to bring a unique synchronicity between online and cable news. Microsoft pulled out, and the channel floundered for years, with its news programming in last place and prime time filled with TrueCrime and prison "documentaries". In recent years, these have been replaced (at least on weekdays) by left-of-center opinion to counterprogram the Fox News Channel. Thanks to shows hosted by Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann (before his departure for Current), they became a big player in cable news again. Your Mileage May Vary about the actual opinions, but they're at least behaving like a news network again and not a cheesy ripoff of CourtTV.
The weekends, though...it seems like they never plan for breaking news. While CNN and Fox News can break format in a moment's notice and always have somebody ready to go, MSNBC continues to air prison docs or Dateline NBC reruns while the on-call weekend guy rushes across Long Island to get into the studio to start the coverage hours too late. There's a reason the tag #msnbcfail is popular on Twitter in these situations. Especially egregious in the case of weather events or other stories that break locally before going national: in theory they have access to the local NBC affiliate's feed.
Fuse TV was created in response to MTV's decay, aimed at a slightly more "hardcore" crowd than MTV's original target audience. It quickly went the same way as MTV, replacing music programming with reality shows (like what MTV did) like Rad Girls (a female version of Jackass) and Pants-Off Dance-Off, and even showing anime (like what MTV Italy did, though they gave up on the latter after showing only Ergo Proxy and Tenjho Tenge). At one point, there was only two or three hours of music-based programming in any given day, and some of that was an annoying infomercial called VictorYTV, paid for by the insufferably emo-focused Victory Records label. It got to the point where some distrusted the channel because it pandered to Victory and emo in general, at the peril of other genres. It may have been the fastest case of Network Decay ever, and it put the channel under Total Abandonment for a while.
This went about as well as one would expect, as "MTV, but still showing music" was Fuse TV's chief selling point, and losing that caused ratings to sink like a rock. Realizing where they went wrong, they made a strong effort to fix their decay, canning most of their non-music-related reality shows and bringing in new music shows — they even re-hired popular former VJ Juliya Chernetsky, whom it was thought would never agree to return after the way she had been unceremoniously fired. Even the movies that they show, like Rocky Horror and Wayne's World, are related to music. The only non-music show Fuse TV airs is Funny or Die's Billy on the Street, along with day-delayed encores of NBC's Last Call with Carson Daly, which easily meets Fuse's mission as the last half of the show consists of performances and artist profiles.
The only decay still lingering at the network is what was left over from their transition from MuchUSA into Fuse TV. Even then, on June 20, 2010, Fuse simulcasted the 2010 MuchMusic Video Awards, marking the first time the station has aired content from MuchMusic since 2002. The network also added Video On Trial in the fall of 2011, indicating that the channel may once again become the new American simulcast of MuchMusic.
MTV UK's genre channels (MTV Base plays Urban, MTV Two plays indie rock & alternative, to give two examples) have their own programming, but it's related to the music that the channel plays — interviews, that sort of thing. These have recently been cut back in favour of playing more music videos, thus creating the first known instance of MTV being criticised for playing too many music videos.
CBS, during the period when it was overseen by CEO Laurence Tisch (1986-1995), found themselves finishing in third place (behind both ABC and NBC) during the 1988-89 season. This includes the once dominant nightly newscast. For the next few years, CBS for better or for worse, arguably gained a reputation (when compared to other broadcast networks) as being the "old folks network". It was also during the Laurence Tisch era that CBS lost the National Football League package (which they had since 1956) to a fledging Fox Network in December 1993. This in the process, helped cost CBS many affiliates (who switched over to Fox shortly thereafter) and viewers. Meanwhile, CBS wound up losing approximately $500 million off of a $1.2 billion, four year long (1990-1993) contract with Major League Baseball. Eventually, things started to turn around for CBS by the end of the '90s. They regained NFL coverage (outbidding NBC for the American Football Conference package in 1998) and debuted Survivor and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Ultimately, according to Nielsen, CBS has been the top-rated network since the 2008–2009 and season.
Discovery Health, one of the few Discovery-related channels to remain completely true to its concept (medical and health-related shows), eventually focused their programming on childbirths to the point that they were nicknamed as "The Childbirth Channel", with about 3-4 hours of shows that actually made it into the day's programming that didn't show only childbirth. Jon And Kate Plus Eight started out on Discovery Health before moving to TLC. It was eventually replaced in 2011 with a network devoted entirely to Oprah Winfrey. Yes, you read that correctly — an entire channel dedicated to Oprah. Fortunately, Discovery Health made a comeback one month later, by merging with FitTv (becoming Discovery Fit & Health), and taking most of the programming hours, ironically restoring the original format that FitTV took over when it was brought by Discovery in the late 90s.
CNN suffered a slip for a while around 2007 when it decided to leave its neutral viewpoints in an attempt to appeal more to Fox News viewers with a nightly lineup featuring right-wing commentators Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck, and Nancy Grace (the last two on HLN back-to-back with Larry King (in his final seasons) after that. With its new intentions, ratings plummeted and CNN lost a lot of faith among viewers more interested in non-biased viewpoints. After Beck was fired and Dobbs and King retired, CNN wouldn't fully recover from this programming change until Piers Morgan came in 2010. Arguably they still haven't recovered as the only time their viewers come in is for the most breaking of news and seem more enchanted with playing with their on-set toys like the "Magic Board" to show the news.
Unique Situations
The Speed Channel is a unique case. They mostly show car-related broadcasts and some racing... but about 99.999 percent of the actual races they show is NASCAR-related. The Other Wikiclaims that Speed Channel shows other forms of racing, but it's probably punted to the dead hours. Like Formula One? Better be up at an ungodly hour, although that's because most European and Asian races are shown live without tape delay. Time differences are a bitch. Like World Rally Championship shows? Too bad, hope you have Velocity! To make matters worse, there's a program called The Racing Chef that's basically a NASCAR-themed cooking show! That, and there's endless tuner reality competitions and the occasional auto auction.
By their very nature, sports channels which consist of nothing but college and high school sports (such as the Fox and CBS college sports channels and the Big Ten Network) must decay in the summer due to the lack of college and high school sports being played. This means that they either carry minor league summer sports or some programming which strays slightly from the format, or air rerun after rerun of football and basketball games played months ago and with all of the drama of a live event removed with a simple check of the team schedule or even looking at the event's guide listing, along with reruns of coach's shows which could be awkward if said coach has been terminated since the first airing of an event.
Tennis Channel is in a similar situation. During major tournaments, particularly the four Grand Slams, it features nearly round-the-clock coverage, but at other times has to fill out its schedule with original programming — Tennisography, "classic" matches (sometimes cut down to half an hour), Best of 5, Destination Tennis (a travel show), but all tennis-related. The farthest the channel has drifted from its actual subject (except for the requisite late-night/early-morning filler of infomercials) is an occasional flirtation with badminton or ping pong, but as those are net sports they still easily count (since there will never be a market for The Badminton Channel in the States).
German TV station "Das Vierte" started as a channel that would show a long range of shows and movies from the sixties to eighties. As time went on the channel became poorer and now there are only a few advertisers willing to pay them, forcing the channel to change the schedule in 10am Living gospel church broadcast for an hour, 8pm random movie for two hours and 10pm for Ghost Hunters for an hour and the rest of the programm being constant Home shopping and infomercials. They just have no other choice and I am sure that they will be cancelled sooner or later...
which is ironic considering "Das Vierte" means "The fourth" as in "the fourth channel" that they originally wanted to become (with other longer running networks having been called after numbers, too). More specifically, those networks are ARD, branding itself as Das Erste (The First), and ZDF (Das Zweite, The Second), which are the two long-established public broadcasters, and Die Dritten (The Thirds), a collection of public regional channels affiliated with ARD. With its choice of name "Das Vierte" essentially aspired to become the most-prominent private station, ahead of all the others that have been started (the oldest among them 20+ years earlier). Needless to say, it hasn't quite worked out that way...
Another note of comedy is that some TV-magazines completely ignore the drastic changes and have the programs of "2pm commercials, 3pm homeshopping, 4pm infomercials" being listed in every issue. Really gets annoying when they have you favourite culture channel having only the 8-10 PM programs being printed in favor of knowing which type of commercial you can watch on "Das Vierte".
The Lifetime Movie Network (now known more by their catchy initials, LMN) used to exist to air nothing but Lifetime Movies of the Week, which also included TV movies that aired on the Big Three networks. With the broadcast networks completely ditching TV movies outside of Jesse Stone, the Hallmark Hall of Fame and the Wal-Mart/Proctor & Gamble films which have to get on TV as if they were paying for an Infomercial, and their mother channel's new A&E ownership deciding to invest more in reality shows and Ripped from the Headlines TV movies which will age horribly in only a couple years, LMN has long since begun to air Hollywood films that fit the channel's focus group and take it out of the all-Damsel In Distress-all the time rut it was in for many years.
Unique Situations - Cartoon Network
Cartoon Network, the channel with the dubious honor of being this generation's MTV, was originally used as a showcase for classic Hanna-Barbera and Warner Brothers cartoons, but these were eventually replaced by an increasing number of original productions and anime; the Boomerang network was created to serve the original purpose of its parent network. The decision to run original programming created an era that is largely perceived as the network's Golden Age, as it generated popular shows that broke out of the Animation Age Ghetto (like The Powerpuff Girls and Dexter's Laboratory) and helped fuel the anime boom at the turn of the century (thanks to Toonami and [adult swim]).
The good times weren't to last, sadly. The decay arguably began due to the controversy of the Boston Bomb Scare, which forced Jim Samples, the head of Cartoon Network to step down. He was replaced by Stuart Snyder, who, let's just say, had other plans for the network. The network eventually (and randomly) phased out original series that were very popular; this was somewhat justified, however, as many of those series were out of first run. The problem is that they replaced these popular series with mediocre shows and fewer original series; they even began running a small amount of live-action movies (though at the time, they were mercifully rare). The network fell deeper and deeper into Network Hell as its executives tried to turn it into a generic kids' network to compete with Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel — they killed Toonami (and its replacement, Miguzi) in complete defiance of what the viewers wanted, then replaced those blocks by starting to show live-action films on a more frequent basis. The decay also forced Adult Swim and Boomerang to decay as well, to heavy disdain by their fanbases. This attempt to rebrand the network came to a head when CN Real, a block of live-action reality shows and scripted series, was created. To the surprise of nobody except the network higher-ups, CN Real tanked harder than anything the network had ever done before.
In the end, Cartoon Network is one of the most insane examples of this Trope, if only because of how much of a rollercoaster ride the network's ridden in regards to the Trope. CN could spend as much as eighteen months showcasing live-action shows, only to go back to animation the next day as if nothing happened — and just when you get comfortable with that, it'll return to live-action. This is likely due to the network's top executives being firm believers of the Animation Age Ghetto, which leaves one to wonder why they want to be in charge of a network devoted to animation in the first place.
Mocked in Aqua Unit Patrol Squad 01 where in the episode "Jumpy George", a woman hires Meatwad to babysit her children. Her instructions:
"They're allowed to watch half an hour of television, and only cartoons. Which means no Cartoon Network."
Unfortunately, these days were not to last. When Cartoon Network began to decay and Adult Swim’s sister block Toonami was canceled as a result, Adult Swim decayed with it. Heck, the Boston Bomb Scare started out as an Adult Swim ad campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force. One of the earliest instances of the decay was when Adult Swim ran Saved by the Bell for a week as a joke, inspired by complaints about their cheesier retro programming at the time. Fans were not happy about this and hoped it was just another one of Adult Swim's jokes, as Adult Swim has been a notorious Trolling Creator. But unfortunately, their fears were realized. The block's emphasis began to increasingly move into both original and imported live-action shows such as Childrens Hospital, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, Delocated, and The Office. While the live action Adult Swim shows have better critical reception than their Cartoon Network counterparts because they aren't just Discovery Channelripoffs, these works and the decision to air live action has (not surprisingly) divided or enraged much of the fandom.
It didn't help that these live action shows were pushing out a number of animated shows, along with an increasing over-reliance on FOX Acquisitions for viewership and filling timeslots. And it gets worse: mirroring Cartoon Network's decision of ending Toonami, the most notable example of the decay has been the block's move away from anime. Once one of the main reasons to watch the block, it's since been relegated exclusively to the Saturday Night-Sunday Morning timeslots*
and has been considered to be an almost legendary example of not just the decay of Adult Swim, but Cartoon Network as a whole. Suddenly, the block that saved shows from being Screwed by the Network were now screwing its own shows over.
The "live-action instead of animation" slope; combined with their increasingly vocal disdain towards anime; as well as their insults to their fans about the decay in their ad bumpers have been enough to push many of its fans away. In fairness though, it's not all bad and they're nowhere near as bad as a lot of the examples on this page. The presence of strong anime and animated comedy shows have managed to keep the block out of Total Abandonment and their fans clamoring for more.*
Adult Swim might have it worse than the rest of Cartoon Network, due to the same constant schedule switching that has screwed over many of its titles, what's decaying one week can be on the upswing the next. They have also called Cartoon Network's decay out in the past, and even lampshade their own strange programming choices at times, so they're at the very least aware of their own "decay". We’d all love to know if Adult Swim is more on their way to Total Abandonment or Recovery; or if their executives are becoming advocates of the Animation Age Ghetto for that matter, but in the end, it’s really hard to make a call.
Boomerang, Cartoon Network's classic animation channel, isn't running live-action programs (unless you count The Banana Splits) but it has apparently begun dumping its rules on how old a cartoon has to be in order for them to show it, and has also become rather hypocritical about which ones it shows. They're willing to run Baby Looney Tunes and Duck Dodgers (2002-05), but not the 1990s Looney Tunes spin-offs Taz-Mania or The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries; the same unfortunately also goes for other 1990s Warner Bros. Animation fare like Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, and Histeria!, despite this network having previously shown Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series. This could be justified for some when you consider that many shows CNaxed in the last decade were extremely popular, and Boomerang is a channel with a tendency to show popular cartoons that CN doesn't (Although this doesn't excuse why they won't show stuff like Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs, which are still extremely popular to this day and have tons of fans wanting them back on air). Not to mention this will only become fairer over time, since Boomerang is meant to show Cartoon Network’s classics and Time Marches On along with the cut-off date.
Latin America got it worse. It totally abandoned the classic shows format and became an equivalent of India's POGO, now showing programs aimed at teenage girls, including CN Real shows and many MTV shows like Parental Control and Date My Mom.
In the UK, CNX began as a channel devoted to shows that appealed to the American equivalent of shonen in the mornings and afternoons, with uncensored anime and kung fu movies later at night. However, its Toonami block, aimed at a younger audience, quickly expanded to take over the entire channel. It has recently mutated into CN Too, which is actually marketed as a second Cartoon Network.
If you live in Asia, you may have noticed that Cartoon Network Asia and it's sister channel Boomerang Asia are both very confused about their reasons of existence as of late. It has gotten to the point where all new shows premier on Boomerang Asia while Cartoon Network Asia only airs old classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons and their Cash Cow FranchiseBen 10 (which they air about 10 times a day), and the occasional original rerun, with about only one new show every now and then (as in, one every year). Heck, even many shows on their current list has premiered on Boomerang years before being finally put on Cartoon Network. Rubbing salt on the wound is that Boomerang Asia is not as widely available and yet it gets all the best shows (My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, anyone?) does not help. Shouldn't those old reruns be on Boomerang while new shows be on CN instead?
Broad Enough to Avoid Decay
Animal Planet, which still plays entirely animal-related programming. Granted, most of the animal-related programming they show is Animal Cops and other Reality TV associated with domesticated animals. It sort of overshadows anything to do with wild animals. However, the lack of showing documentaries, wild animal-related shows, and shows like Animal Cops like they used to has gotten fans concerned that something worse can happen. The decision to change the network's slogan to "Surprisingly Human" certainly does not help.
Latin American viewers are somewhat bemused at the fact that Animal Planet shows movies.
Losing Cartoon Express aside, USA Network really seems to have gotten better as time went on. Unlike sister network Syfy, USA never really had one gimmick or target demographic to cater to. They can get away with showing almost anything and either get high ratings (WWE Raw; Psych), critical acclaim (The4400; The Starter Wife), or both (Monk; Burn Notice). Their slogan "Characters Welcome" means they are able to put on whatever they want as long as it has a strong character driven plot, which encompasses almost all of fiction, without worrying about Network Decay.
In the early 90s, USA may have been most famous for "Up All Night," where it showed B movies on late night weekends hosted by either Rhonda Shear's boobs or Gilbert Gottfried's grating voice. So yes, it can be fair to say the quality of programming has gone up. They can pretty much show anything, and advertise The Bourne Supremacy and Along Came Polly equally without having anyone bat an eye, and even have shows that match such movies thematically.
If you think about it for a while, USA is really what its (older) sister network, NBC, wishes it could be. Thing is, the shows that are a success on USA would never be given time to find their audience on an over-the-air network.
Adult Swim once ran Saved by the Bell for a week as a similar joke, inspired by complaints about their cheesier retro programming at the time, although then again, [as] has underwent significant decay since.
Any shopping or infomercial channel. As long as they can stick a toll free number on the bottom of the screen and a price on the side, they can sell anything and everything and never be accused of decaying.
You can always count on public access cable channels to have low-quality production values and to cover local events with a homespun angle you don't find on the network stations.
Regional cable news channels like the News 12 networks in the New York suburbs and Time Warner's YNN / NY 1 system serving New York State and New York City proper, respectively, and CLTV of Chicago usually stick to just news confined to their regions. But on the most slow of news days they might wander a little out of their main coverage area, or cover national breaking news just to keep things moving along and not have to depend on inane feature reporting to fill time. In fact, NY 1 was commended for having about the most sane coverage of Hurricane Irene around, mainly because it was confined to the five boroughs.
RFD TV (basically Rural TV) has pretty much stuck to shows for farmers and fans of rural living, along with nostalgic country programming to satisfy their needs. Although there was a threat of network decay when they aired Imus in the Morning for a couple years (but even then he owns a farm for ill children in New Mexico, so it still easily fit the network's mission), Imus has moved on to Fox Business Network and it's all farm programming (and of course, I Love Toy Trains!, a cult favorite of The Soup) there. The network is so dedicated to their mission that the network's CEO made a clear promise never to air either an infomercial or any erectile dysfunction drug ads on their air.
C-SPAN is dependable as can be. The mainstay is still House and Senate sessions (or should we say, House sessions and Senate quorum calls). When the houses aren't in session, you'll get some light non-inflaming political talk, academic panel discussions, the Prime Minister's Question Time once a week, and whatever other political events they can find. Oh, and Book TV on C-SPAN2 during the weekends. There, you might get a little Kindle talk, but otherwise if it's bound with pages, that's all you'll get there. Of course, it helps that C-SPAN is contractually obliged not to decay.
Hallmark Channel is pretty well guarded against decay. Even with their daytime block of Martha Stewart programming, repeats of 80's sitcoms, and their hyperfocus on Christmas television films in the last part of the year, unless the network suddenly signs a contract with a monster trucking circuit, the channel's mission is so broad anything works as long as it makes you feel warm and fuzzy.
PBS Kids Sprout may be partially owned by Comcast, but the "PBS" name in the network has guaranteed that the network is about education and fun first, selling toys second. The network's steady cast of humans (only one left so far because of an Old Shame college comedy film in 2005, and another moved to behind-the-scenes puppetry), Sesame Workshop backing, great continuity (Chicken puppet Chica is the personification of a Ridiculously Cute Critter) and a schedule usually not filled with much change has made it a safe haven while Nick and Disney market everything about their preschool characters.
It's surprising that Network Decay in general hasn't been used as an argument against defunding PBS. The last time the conservative movement had enough power in Washington, DC to bring that under serious discussion, the existence of networks such as the Discovery Channel, The History Channel and TLC were used to argue that we don't need PBS anymore. All those have undergone significant decay since then — Discovery and TLC are now dominated by reality shows, while History has been devoting an increasing (and, frankly, scary) amount of time to conspiracy theories and pseudoscience. All in all, PBS has done a very good job of avoiding Network Decay throughout its existence.
HDNet will always show all of their programming in the original aspect ratio without any kind of stretching or tweaking (which means, unfortunately, that if a local station wants to use a sports highlight from HD Net, it will usually be cut to pieces). However it now voluntarily gives airtime to Joe Francis for some Girls Gone Wild "Search for the Hottest Girl Who Wants to Lose Her Dignity in America" contest and a few more shows where women show off their...endowments, including the sexcom Svetlana. This is likely because, when even cut-rate gem selling network Jewelry Television has an HD channel, HDNet is losing their niche of being able to throw on anything in HD to get an audience as the basic channels move over to HD.
If a network is owned by a sports league or is devoted to a specific sport, all you'll get is content from that sports league or sport. Well, most of the time; NBA TV shows international basketball, while the NFL Network will show a couple of college football bowl games and CFL games. NHL Network shows minor-league games as well as the hockey world championships, while Toronto's Leafs TV also shows events for their farm teams. MLB Network during the offseason airs games from smaller leagues including the Arizona Fall League and many of the winter leagues in the Caribbean and Central and South America. But hey, at least it's still that sport! Most sports fans wouldn't mind that these programs, especially if the sports league is in its off-season in which fans of that sport may be craving for some more of that sport.
Fox Soccer Channel is very stubborn about only showing other sports during their airing of hours of British sister channel Sky Sports News. Otherwise it's nothing but the beautiful game. It should be noted that one could cite this as an example of decay since the network started out as Fox Sports World which showed a variety of non-US based sports (rugby, cricket, Aussie rules football, etc) which gradually disappeared until only soccer (always the most frequently aired and highly rated sport on the network) was left prompting the rebranding. However, with the death of Setanta Sports due to the Irish debt crisis, FSC started up a Spin-Off network called Fox Soccer Plus, and added rugby and cricket to that network's schedule (ESPN now has AFL rights). An odd but notable example of Network Regeneration.
The Film Zone originally showed both new and old movies before dedicating itself to movies too old for other channels, but not old enough for Retro and TCM.
Fuel TV is known as one of the lowest-viewed channels on cable television because of their heavy reliance on Extreme Sports like surfing and skateboarding, which are usually best experienced outside. They've stuck to their mission even with the low ratings, and even their few original comedy shows are based around extreme sports. The network has become the official cable home of the UFC, though in this case as MMA is still considered in that "extreme" area of sports, it still works and the programs are designed to draw Fuel out of the Nielsen basement, so they can only help.
Technically cable music channels (the ones that just air audio and display the track and artist information) like DMX, Music Choice and MTV's Urge package aren't really television channels, but beyond throwing out the occasional fad or Dead Horse Genre format (what's Toni Basil's "Mickey" doing in the rotation of Music Choice's Classic Alternative station? A throwback to when it was the New Wave channel), these channels are designed to purposefully not decay based on format division between each channel (you're never going to find Lady Gaga playing on the Oldies channel, for instance).
Channels from international broadcasters, especially those funded by their individual governments, are almost always undecayable since said government is always going to present their country in the best way possible. Though as seen below...
BBC America has begun to add American sci-fi programs to their lineup. It started with Star Trek: The Next Generation repeats for seemingly no reason other than that Patrick Stewart is British (...but he plays a Frenchman!...), and then later with The X-Files*
which does star British-raised American actress Gillian Anderson, but BBC America never mentioned Anderson's nationality in promos
and the revived Battlestar Galactica (recently, The X Files and TNG have both been dramatically scaled back in repeats). Other than these three shows and the American version of Kitchen Nightmares, BBC America nearly exclusively shows what it always has, British programming mostly (butnotstrictly) from The BBC. The channel just basically shows "British Programming", and the only reasons it has the BBC name is that its owned by the BBC and the name "BBC" has the same kind of name recognition in America for "British Programming" as "NPR" does for "public radio". According to this article, BBC America's new president "would like to add more made-in-America series to the U.K.-heavy lineup". Take that as you will.
The Canadian channel The Movie Network is similar to TCM in the fact that they don't show commercials during movies and the commercials they show between films are advertising the network itself or are actually independent Canadian short films. Pretty much all of their programming is movies or movie-related. They will also show HBO series/specials, but this is a good thing because Canadian audiences really wouldn't have anywhere else to see them; besides, HBO is short for Home Box Office.
ITV 4 has also fallen into this. Good range of programmes, slightly better than ITV 2, as in no wacky shows like The Only Way Is Essex (except maybe for Get Away, a car-theft gameshow with a Ms. Fanservice presenter. The show is so obscure there's nothing on Google about it.). However, it only shows a limited selection of Police, Camera, Action! episodes, not the full series, and Police Stop! misses out Police Stop! 11, a Very Special Episode. Fans are not amused. Other shows just about get the full rotation run though, namely Minder as one example.
Websites
Total Abandonment
Encyclopedia Dramatica, a website described as "Wikipedia for Trolls" began a retool in April 2011 into Oh Internet, which continued their tradition at cataloging memes and internet culture, but without all the Not Safe for Work material and trolling culture and style. Users of the site were not too pleased at this, to say the least, quickly setting up mirror websites as a replacement and the head administrator was bombarded with hate mail and death threats.
Gaia Online may qualify. Originally an anime-centric roleplay site, it's focus has shifted towards general entertainment and pop culture, much of the quality of the site's features has dropped considerably, and a great deal of new items and features require the purchase of Gaia Cash, a virtual currency bought with real money, which is a sharp turn to a site that was for the most part free and losing much of their fanbase in the process.
Slipped
Myspace resorted to a Re Tool in Fall 2010 due to fewer and fewer people using the site, having lost most of them to Facebook. The new CEO proclaimed that Myspace is no longer a social network, but "Social Entertainment", revamping itself into an entertainment site and alienating the few people who still used the site. This included a new logo, new homepage and a new profile layout. They were about to force everyone to upgrade their profiles to the new layout (considering how many Myspace sites are Mirror Cracking Ugly, this was considered an improvement) when the uproars of They Changed It, Now It Sucks caused them to back down and allow users to change their profiles back to how they originally looked, glitter GIFs and all. This still hasn't stopped people from abandoning the site, unfortunately, and it was sold for a pittance to a group which includes an ad agency and Justin Timberlake.
The Good Old Games digital distribution was designed to 1: provide quality old games, 2: do so at low prices and, 3: With no DRM. It has always had a few newish titles in it's library, though all very much Cult Classics (Like Psychonauts and Beyond Good And Evil) and the newest titles being sequels (like one would get in the bundles that one would otherwise buy to get the old games) or spiritual successors to games that fit (Such as UFO After Blank to the not carried X-Com). The 2nd part has slipped a little more, with almost all new titles being offered for the maximum $9.99. The 3rd is still steady though. It has been announced the system will carry The Witcher 2, though this is because of the obvious advantages (GOG is run by the same company, making it more profitable than other digital distribution networks as well as keeping the game DRM free.)
4chan was intended to be a place to discuss Japanese comics and anime, an American counterpart to the popular Japanese Futaba Channel ("2chan") imageboard. However, these days many consider it to be more of a meme and trolling site due in thanks to the infamous /b/ board. It is not uncommon for a fan of anime and other Japanese media to say they wouldn’t touch the site with a 10 foot pole, and with the stuff that goes on there, who would blame them? They still have plenty of discussions about Anime and Manga, and an untold amount of Anime memes have originated from here but a good amount of people that came just for the memes are unfortunately advocates of the Animation Age Ghetto, and as a result, there are a pretty strong hostility towards anime and Japanese around 4chan these days.
DozerfleetWiki early-on began its life aiming only to be strictly a cataloging of the Dozerfleet founder's (goes by IvanRider on the site) project history, and a list of articles about fictional characters and items/mythology in some of those projects. Then came the Ferris invasion, documenting non-fiction works made in cooperation with a TV production graduation class for spring 2010 at Ferris. After a year and a half of the "Ferris Invasion," along came the SWOCC Invasion which documented about 30 different projects that were made in the latter half of 2010 at SWOCC Studios in Farmington, MI. Then came the Tri-Sola Invasion, documenting and creating navboxes for poems written by a poet from St. Johns for his Tri-Sola Poetry collection. (Mike was a friend of IvanRider's.) There was also the addition of a Sims fan site called Utterly Sims which was merged into the Wiki. And then the Dozerfleet Blog and Dozerfleet Forum were merged into the Wiki, sharing space only with Facebook and Google+ for IvanRider's personal anecdotes. Things really got complicated when some of the news about government waste incensed IvanRider, leading to the Shrimp on a Treadmill Index on some articles; and later a Featured Video of the Month section which would devote itself from November of 2011 until November of 2012 entirely to videos attacking left-wing policies, or exposing the seedy histories and criminal conspiracies of groups associated with the Obama administration. The Featured Monthly News / What's Hot This Year section became half of the regular project updates news and half rants about political and culture war developments. It remains to be seen how much of the new political dimension will remain active after the 2012 election year.
Illumistream used to be a general health channel on YouTube, and they still do some general health advice videos. Then they started introducing a sex health segment. Fair enough. Then they started focusing more and more on sex health, to the point where it seemingly became their main focus. Hey, it's still health related, so it's still fair. Then they started doing more and more videos on steamy sex confessions with little visible or tangential connection to actually health advice or even sex health advice, almost as if their whole intention now is to turn into a softer-than-softcore version of Penthouse or something. Oh-kay... But alas! They have appeared to have learned the error of their ways and in the past several months returned to being a sex health/general health channel, with about an equal emphasis on the two!
Unique Situations
This very wiki. Despite the name, this site no longer focuses on television. Over the past couple of years, it has added movies, books, board games and video games to its lineup. Lately, it's even been moving away from tropes, adding Useful Notes, Audience Reactions, Trivial Facts, writer's tools, and humor pages. Of course, this wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. What's happened here is more expansion than decay; since we're not dealing with a finite number of time slots, we didn't have to remove any of the original material to make room for the new stuff. Given that most TV tropes originated in literature, mythology, and theater, such expansion makes sense. It gives perspective on the tropes.
YouTube was originally meant to be a medium for people to broadcast their homemade videos and independent shows. Then a bunch of people got the idea to start uploading a bunch of commercial copyrighted material so that others could watch their favorite shows and movies anywhere without the hassle of commercials or having to buy the DVD. Today, it seems most people go to YouTube for mostly clips if not full episodes of mainstream commercial shows while the site's creators (and now Google since they purchased it) are dealing with lawsuits from companies like Viacom, suggesting they let all the copyrighted material be posted to increase YouTube's exposure. This eventually lead to the creation of Vevo, which is backed by the industry and specifically caters to music. Of course in fairness, YouTube's roots still exists as homemade videos are still posted and viewed daily. If anything YouTube's decay seems to be more of the fault of the video uploaders more than the executives.
How about Google Street View?, which started as a service to allowed internet dwellers to explore the roads of their own home, and of other cities and countries. Including far off nations including South Africa, Romania or Brazil. Then in 2009, they started introducing landmarks, including parks, stadiums (the World Cup being the whole reason for South African updates) and other points of interests. After 2009 and 2010, which had spread to nearly 30 countries, Street View began catering more to landmarks, taking an apparent focus to museums (the internet equivalent of Adored by the Network), and not even updating roads, except for a brief unadvertised update to France and Brazil, until they introduced a Channel Island and Monaco, which were the only two new places to be introduced in nearly a year. This might be the side-effect of the Wi-Fi Capturing Case though, as not only are road updates relatively neglected, but their last two updates was the official introduction of Google Places (Indoor business photos) and a whole bunch of parks already collected. Note that Google Street View stays out of Total Abandonment and Slipped due to the fact they still offer roadside views, and the occasional, but rare, actual road update, and that park updates usually include in-park roads.
Ultimate Disney originally consisted of simple lists detailing which Walt Disney movies became available on DVD, and in what collections. Later, the website also contained reviews of some of the DVDs. It also gained a forum for discussing Disney titles of the past, present, and future, as well as some miscellaneous topics. However, when Disney started releasing fewer of their titles on DVD, Ultimate Disney registered an alternate domain, "DVDizzy", for hosting reviews of other studios' movies and shows. All of Ultimate Disney's content absorbed into DVDizzy after a few years. Fortunately, not only do the authors continue to promote and review Disney-owned movies and shows on DVD (and Blu-Ray), but ultimatedisney.com still redirects to dvdizzy.com, and the Disney-themed part of the forum still has a spot on the top of its index page.
Radio
In General
The death of Radio Drama due to the rise of television in the 1950s can be seen as an example of this.
The oldies and classic rock formats in general has been undergoing a justified form of decay for a long time. The passage of time means that the line between "classic/oldies" and "modern" continues to move forward. It's not uncommon to hear music by Guns & Roses, Metallica, Madonna, Michael Jackson, the Black Crowes, or even Nirvana on such stations when it once would have been unfathomable...until you remember that The Eighties was over thirty years ago, a fact that can make a child of the 1980s feel old.
Lampshaded by a line in Bowling For Soup's song "1985":
In recent years, a lot of modern rock stations around the country have undergone decay, either adding more classic rock to their playlists or dropping rock music altogether for something else entirely. Much like the decay of the music video networks, this one has a lot to do with the internet. The fanbase for modern rock is, by and large, more net-savvy than the average American, and rock musicians were among the first to start relying heavily on the internet for self-promotion, increasingly forgoing airplay on terrestrial radio. With their listeners migrating en masse to the internet, rock music stations were forced to adapt if they were to survive. As artists in other genres start moving online, this trend may soon start creeping across the airwaves, especially with respect to those stations targeting younger listeners.
Many modern rock stations have begun to play indie rock to attract back listeners, and it's worked pretty well. (It also brings things full circle, inasmuch as "modern rock" is basically a more commercialized version of what was once known as "alternative rock" or "college rock", i.e. the original indie rock.) Others have switched to "active rock" stations (which play harder rock in addition to classic rock), which have also worked pretty well, too.
The AM band used to be the only way to listen to radio, which meant that there used to be far more AM music stations. However, in The Seventies and The Eighties, most music stations switched to FM, which has a much higher audio quality, and those that didn't found themselves hemorrhaging listeners and shutting down. As a result, countless AM radio stations decayed out of necessity, switching to the news, talk, and sports that now dominate commercial AM radio.
In Venezuela, most AM stations are still music stations... broadcasting popular music from the 30's to the 80's, about the age they were still relevant before the FM band. The only new music they have, if any, is usually of the folkloric kind.
Radio Disney uses the AM band almost exclusively for their radio stations. It's a brilliant marketing tactic — the lower audio quality (and their demands for record companies to give them ultra-clean versions of songs) means that listeners will have to actually buy the music in order to hear it as it was meant to be played. It does help, though, that Radio Disney is among the biggest pushers of HD Radio, which provides at least FM-quality sound on AM, and is found in the newer cars of parents which are right down their marketing wheelhouse.
In Canada, the CRTC (the Canadian FCC) once actually limited the amount of hit music that could be played on FM. Result: Canada stuck with Top 40 on AM for longer (Toronto had competing Top 40 stations on AM as late as 1993), which also resulted in AM stereo being a bigger success in Canada than in the US. Later, the regulation was re-jigged into a limitation on oldies, a limitation still notvoid in Quebec, but removed in other provinces.
The "Morning Zoo" block on music stations could be seen as a form of this with people who listen to the station strictly for the music, even if the block has been on the station from day one. This is especially true of instances where radio stations decide to dedicate more hours of the week to their "Morning Zoo" hosts.
FM stations simply do not have news departments anymore unless they're public radio or from a local broadcaster who actually gets what the word "broadcasting" means. So you either get no news at all or it told to you in a sarcastic style which hardly informs you.
Don't get any cranky old broadcasting codgers industry veterans started on Clear Channel. Or Jack FM. Or voicetracking, where a DJ in Philly fakes that he knows all about "the haps" in Walla Walla.
A temporary form of Network Decay is when certain radio stations switch to all or mostly Christmas music over the winter holidays. Not only are there people who don't want to hear so much Christmas music (or, in some cases, any Christmas music), but this also disadvantages people who happen to really like the radio station's usual format.
One of our local "goodtime oldies" stations cheerily declared it was going All Christmas All The Time on Dec. 1. About ten days into it, they had so much listener complaint they had to put their usual stuff back on with a mere sprinkling of Xmas tunes!
Kansas City inverts that line of thought then. There are at least two stations that go All Christmas every year and one of them is starting earlier each year to get a jump on the other one. Another station in Wichita actually sees its ratings increase when it plays All Christmas because its normal format isn't suitable for workplaces and offices.
Similar circumstances in California. The ONLY local oldies station in my area, as well as one easy listening station, both go All Christmas the moment Halloween has past every year, and stick with it until the beginning of January. The two stations never waver with such programming... did I mention this is in an area where the winter weather is typically either warm and sunny or mild and wet?
Sirius XM used to throw out their disco channel from November through New Year's for Christmas music, but backlash from fans (yes, Virginia, disco fans still exist, and in surprising numbers) caused them to move it to the religious music section instead, where the disco fans said it had belonged all along.
Any public radio station when they stop carrying classical music to carry more talk programming. It gets ugly usually, with long time underwriters threatening to pull funding, verbose newspaper critics declaring the time of death for American radio, and people complaining about the station moving the format to the infant HD radio band so they have to buy new equipment. This, even though smooth jazz and classical music is dying in the same way elevator music pretty much left FM radio by the mid-90's.
The demise of St. Louis's KFUO-FM follows a similar track. KFUO was started by the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod as a classical music station in 1948, and remained that way until it was sold to Gateway Creative Broadcasting in spring of 2010. Gateway completely revamped the format, and the rebranded KJLY started broadcasting Christian music that summer. Regardless of how one feels about the genre, classical music fans were outraged at the loss of the only game in town. The local NPR station helped pick up the slack with an HD channel devoted to classical music and weekly broadcasts of the local symphony orchestra, but terrestrial listeners are still left high and dry most of the week.
99X in Atlanta was an influential modern rock station that, one random Friday, became the Top 40 station Q100, formerly housed at 100.5.
For (relative) clarity, here's how it happened. 99X was competing with another modern rock station, Project 9-6-1 (96.1 on the radio), which had already undergone its own slight Network Decay when it moved from 105.3. (Before that, 96.1 used to be a classic rock station, and the Project kept playing some of those classic rock songs.) Despite the decay, the Project became more popular than 99X, leading to Q100 getting the 99.7 frequency rights (The same company, Cumulus Media, owns both 99X and Q100). Afterwards, many of the DJs from 99X moved to a new rock station, Rock 100.5 (which was Q100's old position, and also owned by Cumulus Media). After a year, 99X then began broadcasting on the 97.9 frequency. Isn'tExecutive Meddlingfun?
99X did advertise that they would be going to HD radio and online before the old frequency changed formats. The new frequency does not have the same power, unfortunately for those farther outside Atlanta.
Your Milage May Vary, but some people think 95.5 The Beat was this, in that it used to play mostly rap, hip-hop and R&B with a little bit of pop crossover hits. In the later stages, however, they started playing more and more pop (so much so that the other rap station, Hot 107.9 advertised themselves as not being watered down with Justin Bieber) until finally they were replaced with the FM version of WSB radio.
Actually a double decay. In the late '90s, 95.5's playlist incorporated a lot of electronic dance music such as Groove Armada and Eiffel 65. They dropped most of that for hip-hop in the 2000s, thus annoying the listeners who actually did like electronica.
An extreme amount with 107.5 and 102.5, which were a jazz station and oldies/R&B/Soul station respectively, but in 2009, 102.5's programming was moved to 107.5 and 102.5 became a gospel station.
BBC Five Live began life in 1990 as BBC Radio 5, which had a combination of sports and young people's programmes (including the original radio version of Room 101). Then in 1994 it became the "rolling news" station Five Live. Since then Five Live has gradually become filled with phone-in programmes, rather than actual news.
BBC Radio 2 and 3 often get accused of this: Radio 2 suffers the "oldies/classic rock" problem mentioned above, while Radio 3 (officially "classical, jazz, world music and arts") is frequently accused of "dumbing down" for classifying modern jazz, folk, or "experimental" music as part of their remit.
"Dumbing down"? With experimental music (and modern jazz, if by that you mean free jazz instead of ultra-commercial not-really-jazz sort of stuff), wouldn't that be pretty much the opposite of dumbing down?
For any normal station, you'd be right, but this was Radio 3. Their standard format was full-length, uninterrupted, multiple-movement classical music - whole symphonies, complete concertos, and also live opera. They get complaints when they play only one movement of a symphony, or just two acts of an opera, never mind playing a stand-alone aria.
Radio 2 seems to be aiming for the "Too Broad To Decay" category, and are pretty much the last national FM station trying to appeal to different demographics at different times of the day. This causes some truly bizarre juxtapositions, like two hours of modern alternative and indie music presented by DJs who pick the songs themselves followed by a documentary about the history of barbershop quartets, a biographical piece on some famous dead musician or something else not quite niche enough to fit on Radio 3. Despite the predominance of classic rock and oldies during office hours, there's a surprising number of live sessions, and Terry Wogan is widely credited with helping Katie Melua's career get off the ground.
The network decay for commercial stations in Britain came when Global Radio (who bought out G Cap, a hybrid of GWR & Capital Radio Group rebranded "heritage stations" into Heart (softer, more female music) or Capital (generic top 40, usually with Katy Perry in Stupid Statement Dance Mix format - note the station is named after 95.8 Capital FM). People were not amused. Personality-driven radio, which is common in North America, was common in Britain, until 2008, for G Cap until Global came in.
But the process began way back in 2008, when G Cap Media had all its stations local 6-10am and 1-7pm weekdays, 8am-12pm Saturday & Sunday (for G Cap) and 6-10am/4-7pm (Heart/Galaxy), then gradually ebbed away to 6-10am and 4-7pm weekdays, 8am-12pm Saturday & Sunday (for Heart, the former GWR/Capital stations) and 6-10am and 4-7pm weekdays, 8am-12pm Sat & Sun (Capital), leaving all localness gone. Then came the bad part: they merged stations in the regions under Ofcom's new legislation.
That said, people preferred the old G Cap style of presentation and it shows in the complaints leveraged against the stations on social networking.
Localness, and, personality radio, was, and still is a very big part of British radio. Compare stations like 96.6 TFM, Metro-Radio, Hallam FM, The Pulse of West Yorkshire and GMG's Real Radio network, which are local for much of the day and only network at off-peak hours.
UKRD take this Up to Eleven with 24-7 locality, except for the Top 40 Chart Sundays 4-7pm. Every show is locally made, no networking, only voicetracking/voicetracking "as live" off-peak. Which explains how someone can be on 2-7pm and 7-10pm simultaneously on two or three different stations.
The Breeze - owned by Celador, is also criticised, for being bland and formulaic. To quote one radio forum: "Mark Walker - square peg, round hole. Should have been on 95.8 Capital FM breakfast instead of Johnny & Lisa." And that's saying something...
Fresno station KFYE, which was a Christian radio station broadcasting Christian music, sermons, and stories from the Bible, suddenly turned into a "porn radio" station, which played songs overlaid with prerecorded moans and groans. After one year as KSXE, the station became a more generic Top-40 one, changing its callsign to KVPW. The station is now off the air after some disputes with another broadcaster.
San Diego's XHMORE-FM More FM 98.9 zigzagged this trope. For those who don't live in either San Diego, CA, or Tijuana, Mexico, More FM was a station which was aimed to the northwest Baja California (in Mexico) and to the Spanish-speaking communities in San Diego, broadcasting pop music in Spanish like your average Top-40 station, called back then as "Radio Sensación". It gradually changed since its inception until 1994, when it became MORE FM, and it's considered its most memorable phase, as it broadcasted Latin American Rock (and Oldies every Saturday Night), and it was a great way to know about independent Latin American rock bands which deserved more recognition than the same overexposed groups and musicians that swamped the remaining pop music stations in Tijuana (A good thing in Tijuana, since the stations there are either regional folk music or Top 40 clones) and San Diego. But in late 2003, due to the station being acquired by MEC Network, and the death of More FM's original owner, it changed now into a generic English-speaking Hip-Hop station, changing its name to Blazin' 98.9 without any warning, and alienating its former fanbase (which was a very bad decision, since as it was, it didn't have any direct competition and was one of the most listened stations in both cities, and as a hip-hop station it had to compete with two radio stations from San Diego which were already established for some time. The fact their presenters spoke in English, even when presenting in Tijuana drove the point further); And then again, it changed into an English-speaking branch of ESPN Radio somewhere in 2009, again, without any warning. Fortunately, Cadena Baja California (its owner before MEC bought it) transferred it back to its lineup, and brought back the usual Spanish-speaking rock in late September 2010, announcing a string of concerts of Spanish and Latin American Rock Bands, more of the good ol' Rock en Español everyone loved and promotion for local rock bands, causing their former audience to shed tears of joy. Their only change from their 90's era was the fact that the oldies are now played all day during Saturday and Sunday, and these oldies are both in English and Spanish.
100.9 The Zone in Ridgecrest and it's surrounding cities. It was originally an adult contemporary/Top 40 station with its fair share of valley known radio hosts on 103.5 as KRAJ. It would also air a 70's music block hosted all Sunday afternoon every week. Just after the turn of the millennium, they turned into 100.9, playing rap, hip-hop Rn B and their ilk, and fired most of the hosts, going mostly to computers and playlists to choose their music. In 2006, they turned into an oldies format, then changed to a Top 40 and dance format in 2009.
92.3 "The Beat" in Los Angeles and their competition back in the 90s. "The Beat" competed against two other Hip-Hop/R&B stations: "Power 106" and "K-Ace 103.9". "K-Ace" was the first to fall, with the station owner making a radio announcement that they would not be a party to glorifying promiscuity and violence to black youths. They switched over to become an oldies R&B station (a very good one), before eventually being bought and turned into a Latin oldies station. "The Beat" became "Hot 92.3", and "The Beat" call sign moved higher up on the dial to "100.3", leaving "Hot" as a pseudo R&B oldies station with a very limited playlist. Most of "The Beats" old DJs, such as Shirley Strawberry and Theo remained. Currently, "Hot" plays mostly 90s R&B, with some older classic soul mixed in, which is ironic, because the station is now playing tracks they once played as world premieres almost 20 years ago.
CBC Radio Two was Canada's version of BBC Radio 3, mostly playing jazz and classical music. In a gradual period spanning over 12 months in 2007-2008, the station replaced most of its programming with "Adult Album Alternative" music.
A rare example of Network Decay coming full-circle. In the mid-to-late 1990s, three suburban radio frequencies were simulcasting from Arlington Heights (92.7 FM), De Kalb (92.5 FM), and Park Forest (99.9 FM) to achieve full-market range as a single station, albeit on three entirely separate frequencies. The station was broadcasting as "Energy", a format dedicated exclusively to dance/electronic/club music without urban/rap/R&B music. In the early 2000s, the station switched to Spanish-language format and the dance format went off the air. Cut to the mid 2000s, when the three frequencies changed format again from the Spanish format to "Nine FM", a wide-ranging format to compete with off-radio iPod playlists (billing themselves as "we play anything"). Later, Nine FM began broadcasting "Dance Factory", a late-night weekend format that rekindled the dance format from the late 1990s with many of the former DJs returning to spin. The broadcasting hours were expanded to 9pm to 5am nightly. Due to low ratings, 92.5/92.7/99.9 switched away from the "we play anything" format and became an FM mirror for WCPT, an AM progressive talk radio format. Despite the format switch, Dance Factory continues to broadcast nightly on these three frequencies every night as "paid programming" on the same three frequencies as precursor Energy did (helped by the death of Air America creating a dearth of progressive radio shows).
Kevin "Pig Virus" Matheny, Howard Stern's longtime antagonist in the 1980's ran full-service station WGN (under the nose of CEO Randy Michaels, who was well known for turning Clear Channel into the voicetracking machine it is today), long the home of Paul Harvey, the ongoing soap opera of futility known as Chicago Cubs baseball (or more known as "The Pat and Ron Show" to listeners for announcers Pat Hughes and Cub legend Ron Santo), and the home of personalities that lasted decades on the station and never had a political agenda, from 2008-2010. During those two years since WGN owner Tribune went from a public company resistant to any change to the plaything of billionaire Sam Zell, listeners to "The Voice of Chicago" suffered.
The mid-morning team of Kathy and Judy, two older women who had an audience so dedicated to their show that they had a yearly convention that was as big as the winter Cubs convention. Their contract was ended abruptly and suddenly by the new station management and without warning they were saying goodbye to their listeners within one day. The show dominated every other station in the mid-mornings in Chicago. Their various replacements, like a blowhard conservative talkshow host/Michaels buddy from Cincinnati? Not very much at all.
WGN's morning show was known for the length of their hosts, having only three in nearly 45 years; Wally Phillips from 1965-1986, Bob Collins from then on until his sudden and shocking death in a plane crash in 2000, and Spike O'Dell from then on until 2008. The line of succession was about as traditional as you can get; the afternoon guy moves up to mornings, and WGN prided itself on creating a family feel to their shows, hoping their audiences felt the same. Naturally this meant John Williams, the afternoon host for years would get to move up to the morning chair (though this was due to Steve Cochran deciding not to take the morning slot due to a perceived cut in pay despite the prestige; this would turn out to be a warning sign for the events later on).
And he did; for six months. After that, the new management owed to so-called trends and research that the erudite John Williams didn't appeal to their new audience; the 18-49 ultra-political guy every other radio station targets, rather than the long-held 'broadcaster' who everyone could enjoy that WGN held to for years. John Williams was forced out to mid-mornings and replaced by a random political talk guy from San Francisco who has to deal with a "traffic on the 7's" format which ruins any ability to have long conversations. It was thought that Williams was out the door as he does a second show for WCCO in Minneapolis which provides a backstop in case WGN ends his Chicago program; he began in the Twin Cities in the 90's and is very well versed in Minnesota and Illinois politics.
Steve Cochran was shown the door because he outright expressed disgust at the Matheny/Michaels strategy on the air, right to Matheny's face, along with Sam Zell using Tribune as his personal piggy bank. This despite being a huge booster for adoption and many other heartwarming causes.
As for the old Roy Leonard timeslot? It became the home of a pseudo-infomercial for Tribune's blog network where random bloggers blathered on and on about politics.
The final straw was Matheny hiring convincted felon/former city worker Jim Laski as an evening show host, who had never had a minute on the radio beyond sound bites during his trial. He replaced David Kaplan and LongRunnerSports Central, about the last place in Chicago where listeners could talk about any sports without being mocked or shouted down by the hosts. The worst thing was the pushing Milt Rosenberg and Extension 720, the most intelligent and educational commercial radio show in any American market, to 10pm.
Thankfully most of these moves failed (though Meier will probably stick and has fallen more into the traditional WGN format since), and the hirings of Randy Michaels began to be questioned after one of his underlings sent out a near NSFW linkto the entire company e-mail list to "motivate" their employees. It certainly did so, in that everyone in the company wanted him fired, as soon said underling resigned in shame, anger built up over Michaels sullying the traditions of Tribune (including holding a poker night in the sacred space that was Colonel Mc Cormick's office), resulting in him eventually forced to resign by the company's bankruptcy creditors. Matheny soon followed out the door, along with Laski. The station is now undoing the damage with new programmers, bringing back Sports Central to weekends (and eventually to weeknights), killing the blog site infomercial, and trying to get Digilio (who admitted he could no longer watch Private Parts until Matheny's departure without getting physically ill) on more during the week in fill-in slots, much to the relief of all of Chicagoland. Williams is also no longer in jeopardy of having to move to Minnesota, though he's keeping the WCCO show nonetheless.
Suddenly in June 2011 It Got Worse; Randy Michaels came back to town after his non-compete clause ended and decided to buy Q101 and The Loop after their company decided to flee Chicago; nobody else wanted those stations because Q101 pretty much died the moment management didn't renew Mancow Mueller and seems to be permanently stuck thinking it's 1996 playlist-wise, while The Loop now exists solely as a server on shuffle with a bunch of moldy 70's rock on it from St. Louis. Q101 is going all-news and has the most uphill battle in Chicago radio history (taking on #1 WBBM), while The Loop is pretty well doomed no matter what.
For years, 570 KLIF was the leader in talk radio with a wide range of local straight talk and sports talk talk hosts with a politically neutral slant and a loyal fan base known as "AD Ls" (All Day Listeners). The decay arguably started in 1995 when parent company Susquehanna founded the area's first all-sports station, 1310 The Ticket. A couple of years later, sports talk was dropped from KLIF (only Norm Hitzges was retained by the company and moved to the other station). A couple of years later, centrist hosts like Kevin Mc Carthy and Humble Billy Hayes were let go and replaced by the like of "Mouth of the South" Tom Kamb. Eventually, all localized hosts were dropped and the station has run national right-wing, Fox News-style hosts like Dr. Laura and Bill O' Reilly since.
This pushed the local talk focus to Live 105.3 with the likes of Pugs & Kelly, Russ Martin and "Big Dick" Hunter...until 2008, when parent company CBS Radio decided Dallas needed a third all-sports station and rebranded it as 105.3 The Fan, grabbing the Dallas Cowboys from rival 1310 and moving the Texas Rangers from sister station KRLD 1080, and canning all their current talent except morning host Jagger. The station has seen ratings go up recently, likely driven by the Rangers' 2010 World Series run and hiring popular host Gregg Williams after he was fired by the other two sports stations for drug use, but the price has been that localized talk radio is all but dead in Big D.
103.7 KVIL's change from adult contemporary to "lite rock" could be seen as this, especially since it drove longtime morning host Ron Chapman to request a transfer to oldies station 98.7 KLUV, where he lasted until his 2005 retirement.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, 96.3 WDVD in the Detroit area sold itself on having the audacity to not play rap. It played a lot of Sheryl Crow, Nine Days, Three Doors Down, and their ilk. Now if you switch to it you're still unlikely to get actual rap, but good luck finding something that's not Nelly Furtado, Justin Timberlake, or the latest Disney pop "artist".
105.1 WXDG was, one day, completely overhauled into Jazz and R&B after being exclusively Alternative/Indie for quite some time, presumably as a result of these bands beginning to self-promote heavily through the internet and their net-saavy fanbases before anyone else leapt on the boat.
That one's a bit of chain reaction, linked to WDVD above. WXDG had previously been the classical station (as WQRS), and was one of three modern/alternative/indie stations in the Detroit market in the mid-90s (the others being WPLT and the Canadian CIMX, about which more later). The alternative angle didn't work for the station. Then some Jazz/R&B station went under or was facing difficulties, and realizing the large number of affluent older blacks in the Detroit area, WXDG made the hop to Soul, Jazz, and R&B. As expected, the money started flowing in, until the management idiotically cut down the playlist in exactly the wrong way (this is Motown; soul in particular is Serious Business). In the meantime WPLT switched to the much-vaunted "non-rap Top 40" and became WDVD. This left CIMX the only modern/alternative/indie station; it quickly gravitated in a distinctly "modern rock" direction as "89X." While this was going on, WXDG left the Jazz/R&B/Soul market to some other station (I forget which), and became an "Adult Contemporary" station geared to (mostly white) commuting working professionals (they signaled the switch by playing Celine Dion's "Because You Loved Me"), rebranding themselves as "Magic 105.1" (call letters WMGC) and adopting that idiotic "all Christmas music, all the time" format as early as the 1st of November (they're having a bit of an arms race with WNIC, which is more or less the same station owned and operated by different people). This, combined with the similar demographic of WDVD, allowed/forced Windsor "light"-rock/AC station CIDR ("The River") to move into the alternative/indie direction, playing a lot of music that appeals to young, white music snobs and frequently digging into albums rather than playing singles (in other words, a bit like College Radio; and, indeed, the Wayne State University station WDET once devoted much of its schedule to playing that type of music until station management decided more syndicated news/talk content from NPR would improve their ratings). Everybody good and confused? Well, that's just what happens when you deregulate radio.
And the chain reaction goes on: In 2010, WNIC switched to a "hot" AC format, edging in on WDVD's turf. Results have yet to be seen.
WPBZ in the Palm Beach County market was an alternative rock station called "103.1 The Buzz" since it went on the air in 1995... until December 5, 2011, when it suddenly and without warning switched to a format of top 40 music, or as it calls it, "today's best hits without the rap". Alt-rock fans weren't too happy, to say the least. Compounding the anger is that the annual "Buzz Bake Sale" concert festival occurred only a month before the switch, and nobody was aware of the change that was coming. The original format lives on in the HD Radio feed, but the damage has been done, and Palm Beach County no longer has an alt-rock station to call its own- the only rock station left at all is WKGR, "98.7 The Gator", which plays classic rock.
WHDR 93.1 was originally a classical station, then it flipped to dance music and became the popular Party 93.1, "South Florida's Pure Dance Channel." Then it changed to Hispanic music and finally ROCK. Many techno/trance/house fans became devastated until 2008 when Party 93.1 relaunched...on HD Radio. Granted, this is better than nothing.
Party 93.1 wasn't that popular, hence the switch to Latin...which similarly wasn't very successful, leading to the switch to Active and later Mainstream Rock. The rock incarnation never made it into the local top ten, so at Thanksgiving 2010, it became all Christmas music all the time until New Year's day 2011, at which point it became soft Adult Contemporary. We'll see how long that one lasts...
Co-owned Party 95.3 in Orlando had a lesser decay; it started playing more R&B until that format eventually ended up taking over by 2004.
After seven years of broadcasting an alternative rock format (a common one for network decay, as noted above), 105.9 in Orlando — which had switched from a long-running oldies format in 2000 — reverted to its original format in 2008.
Orlando's REAL Radio 104.1. Currently under call signal WTKS-FM, it has, and still does, serve mainly as a talk radio station, with notable shows such as Monsters in the Morning. they in the past were known to play indie, alternative, and modern rock on weekends. In more recent memories, the weekend lineup is more or less classic rock.
Lansing
Radio stations owned by Rubber City that have dial positions in the greater area of Lansing, MI, are frequently victims of being Screwed by the Network. In 1995, 92.1 was known as "92-1 The Edge," with 97.5 being an iffy format and 94.1 being 94.1 "The Bear." The Bear had to compete with B-93.7 in Grand Rapids and 100.7-WITL for country music listeners. One of the most popular pop stations was Z-101.7. By 1999, The Bear became "Kick 94," and started losing its audience to 93.7 and 100.7. 94.1 was re-branded about two years later as WVIC, and became a moderate rock/adult contemporary station. It would become 94-1 "The Edge" in late 2010/early 2011, with an emphasis on alternative rock. All that was different from the original 92-1 Edge was fewer sophomoric sex jokes from the DJs. The original 92-1 Edge was re-branded overnight without warning into My-92.1 in 2001, pretty much becoming the Sheryl Crow Channel. It remained that way until 2004, when it was rebranded overnight without warning into sports radio. By 2011, 92.1 would become a bland country music station on par with its predecessor Kicks 94. The same time that 92.1 lost its title of The Edge, Z101.7 was rebranded as Mike FM. Also without warning. That was in spite the fact the 101.7 had an established audience and was extremely popular. A clone of it was put on the 97.5 dial and dubbed "The New 97-5."
Moral of the story: If you live in Lansing, don't get too attached to any one given radio dial position. Its formatting can change overnight.
Maine
TOS was a popular hard/progressive rock station in Maine that was mostly listened to for the variety of entertaining DJs and hosts. After changing hands a few times in the late '00s, in late 2008 it was finally bought by the newly formed Blueberry Broadcasting, which completely changed the format to Top 40 with some 80s and 90s thrown in (originally, the only older music TOS played was by hard rock icons like Black Sabbath and AC/DC). Even worse, they fired all of their radio personalities, retaining only Tom O. and Mr. Mike, their morning show hosts (although their show is now heavily sanitized and word on the street is they're close to quitting). They even fired popular DJ Chris Rush, known for his publicity stunts and willingness to try new things and meet new people (including one stunt that actually resulted in him once having his jaw ripped off by a tow truck's hook by accident at a local fair, requiring him to have extensive reconstructive surgery to build a new one using one of his ribs). All of the fired personalities were quickly picked up by competing station WKIT (which is owned by none other than Stephen King), and as the ratings for TOS have fallen, WKIT's have gone up steadily since acquiring TOS' DJs.
WQBW 97.3 The Brew has become a major victim of this trope. While they've remained consistent with their emphasis on '80s rock, they underwent several tweaks to their music format — while keeping their station moniker. The most recent of their tweaks was the excising of a large portion of their 1970s classic rock songs, and the addition of 1980s pop songs. Interestingly enough, the station continues to air "Rockin' '70s" on Sunday nights, along with "Rockin' '80s".
It Got Worse. The Brew eventually began using the tag line "The NEW generation of Classic Rock". They even ran promos that made fun of the other classic rock stations in the city for playing outdated music, as if including songs by Billy Idol and Sting in their otherwise typical classic rock playlist somehow made them more hip and relevant. Needless to say, this cemented The Brew's status as the Butt Monkey of Milwaukee radio and t-shirts featuring a spoof of The Brew's famous beer-cap logo reading "Milwaukee Radio Sucks" became popular sellers.
It certainly doesn't help that there are now four stations playing the same type of music in Milwaukee, all of them seemingly hyperfocused on those twentyyears of music at the expense of any other format and programmed with that personality-free Jack format under other names (The Hog, The Lake, etc.). It used to be in Milwaukee you couldn't not hear a Mariah Carey song every hour back when they all wanted to be the station you listened to at the office; now it's the complete reverse.
And on Memorial Day weekend they finally blinked and converted The Brew to a Top 40 format called "Radio Now" to take on the local Kiss FM station (here not owned by Clear Channel), mainly because a smooth jazz station with a lousy signal was threatening to switch over to the same "Radio Now" format and try to steal listeners from Clear Channel's other Milwaukee stations. A possible purposeful Self Destructive Charge by the smooth jazz station, as their parent company also owns classic rock powerhouses WKLH and The Hog and were willing to pull a stunt to force The Brew to switch over off-guard.
Time Highway Radio (99.3 FM). Dear god, Time Highway Radio. In the 90s, they were a mostly English channel, playing mostly pop with a weekend oldies slot and had a very witty station ID. Then, they very suddenly went off the air when the monopolizing Astro bought them, and then they reappeared... as a Tamil station!.
Radio 4 (100.1 FM). Apart from it's pop music, it had a childrens slot between 2 to 5 on Saturday and oldies and country from Sunday afternoon all the way to 2AM Monday. The rest was dedicated to English indie and mainstream pop and rock. The childrens slot was outright removed and the oldies and country slots shrank until it was no more. They now only play hip-hop, mainstream pop, and metal. And they changed their name to Traxx FM to reflect their new playlist. While no one cared about the childrens slot, the gradual shrinking of the country and oldies slot, and the removal of them, was the point of decay to many of the older listeners.
Light and Easy (105.7 FM). Originally playing songs from the 50s, 60s and 70s, as of 2010 they changed their name to Light FM, moved on to playing easy-listening genre songs of the 80s, 90s and today. Much of the senior citizen demographics who started listening in when the station started in the 90s were not pleased.
The WCBS-FM affair in New York. For over 30 years, 101.1 CBS-FM was an iconic oldies station, its DJs being local celebrities. Enter Executive Meddling, and in 2005 came JACK-FM, a random music, jockey-less format that focused on the '80s-2000s and punctuated its programming with obnoxious comments by announcer Howard Cogen. To add insult to injury, the former CBS-FM DJs were fired on the day of the flip, without warning. The new station was universally reviled by New Yorkers, with many calling it "Jack Shit FM," and mayor Mike Bloomberg saying he would "never listen to that fucking CBS radio again." It took two years for them to get the message, and in 2007, CBS-FM returned to an oldies format. It can be argued that a bit of decay is still hanging on the station, which had added '80s music to its playlist while cutting back on '50s and some '60s music, but still, it's good to see the station resembling its old self.
The recent infusion of 1980s music on the station, at the expense of 1950s music, may be a sign of changing demographics rather than Network Decay. People who grew up in the 1980s are now entering middle age, and thus the target audience for an oldies station. Meanwhile, people who grew up in the 1950s are now retiring, which means that they no longer have the commute to listen to the radio on. It's the same reason why most music from before The Fifties has been banished to public radio — the target audience got too old to become a reliable market for advertisers.
92.3 K-Rock in New York went through decay twice. First, at the start of 2006, the station switched from its modern rock format (which it had run since The Eighties) to a talk format, with the new name Free FM. This left the largest radio market in the country without a modern rock station. Free FM, anchored by David Lee Roth's morning show, was a disaster, and K-Rock was brought back on the air in less than 18 months, with Opie & Anthony replacing Roth as morning hosts. So far so good, right? Well, in March 2009, the station switched again, this time without warning (Free FM had been announced a month prior to the switch), to "Now FM", a pop station in the vein of Z-100. At least this time, New York has a modern rock station to pick up the slack, 101.9 WRXP...which itself switched from a jazz format in February 2008, leaving jazz fans with only NPR and a single AM radio station to listen to.
In addition to the above-mentioned online competition, another factor in K-Rock's decline may be the fact that each part of the New York area has its own rock station, which saps listeners from any station that tries to broadcast across the whole area. Northern New Jersey has WDHA, commonly nicknamed the "Jersey Giant" due to its dominance of the ratings in that area, and WSOU, a popular College Radio station. The Hudson Valley, meanwhile, has 107.1 The Peak, while Long Island has WBAB. On top of that, there's Q104.3, the classic rock station, which takes away even more listeners.
A mainstay for modern rock in Philadelphia was Y100. Overnight, the station was switched, with no warning, to rap and R&B. To make it even worse, it was an existing station just moving to the more popular frequency... and it kept being simulcast on the old frequency for a few weeks. There was an uproar among the previous listener-ship, but no action ended up occurring. Fortunately, the morning show from Y100 was rescued by WMMR, its former competitor, and arguably the only modern rock station left in Philly.
The Toronto rock station 102.1 The Edge (aka CFNY FM, "The Spirit Of Radio" that Rush so famously wrote a song about) has suffered this, especially over the last few years. The station started broadcasting in 1961, and experienced a critically positive reception in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when it was known as one of the few Canadian radio stations which played alternative music. In the late 1990s, the station was bought by Rogers Communications, and became another corporate rock station. Its programming was homogenized to a point that listeners started to rebel against the station, calling in for alternative songs during all-rock countdowns. Another buyout, this time by Corus Entertainment, completed the transfer of CFNY from truly independent to corporate radio that stifled all creativity. Its decline culminated in a round of layoffs in the company, which included two prominent DJ's: Barry Taylor (who hosted the Thursday block of programming, a traditionally dead block that flourished through his charisma and personality) and Martin Streek, who had worked at the station for over 20 years (he was part of the station's success in the 1980s) and hosted the weekend "live-to-air" events at Toronto clubs. Shortly after the two men were fired, the station whitewashed their biographies and any trace of their careers from the company's website. A few weeks later, Streek wrote a cryptic status message on Facebook ("So...I guess that's it...thanks everyone...I will see you all again soon (not too soon though)... Let the stories begin.") Soon after, Streek committed suicide, and many called The Edge to task for their non-existent coverage of his death. There may be The Edge, but The Spirit Of Radio has finally left the station for good.
WHFS, a long-running alternative-rock station owned by CBS/Infinity, suffered a very similar fate to co-owned K-Rock in New York. In January of 2005, WHFS' 99.1 slot changed to a Spanish-language station known as "El Zol". The call letters, meanwhile, migrated over to 105.7, which was at the time a talk radio station with a very similar format to New York's Free FM; to play on those call letters, they began broadcasting alternative rock on nights and weekends. Eventually, that too was dropped, and 105.7 switched to a sports talk format. It still exists on the HD Radio subchannel of the Washington iteration of "Fresh FM", but by far very few people own an HD Radio, and the famous HF Stival is now just another concert with the has-beens of the 90's playing turn of the millennium rock music which has been run into the ground by dull and unadventurous adult contemporary stations.
WHFS has returned as of August 2011 on 97.5 in Baltimore on a translator with only city-wide range.
Sláger Rádió (Hit Radio; yup, they didn't really use their imagination). It started in The Nineties and differentiated itself from the other radios by playing songs from The Sixties and The Seventies only. The time interval slowly crawled upwards, in the end of the '90s they started playing songs from The Eighties, somewhere in the early 00s they started playing songs from the '90s (and dropped the '60s) and later they started playing contemporary hits thus the only thing differentiating it from its main rivals was its morning show.
After its cancellation in '09, they launched a new radio station, Neo FM, in its place on the same wavelength. It offers much of the same programming with the same presenters, but the new name clearly indicates it's a separate entity from its predecessor with different goals, thus in a way negating the complaints raised against its "former self" and how it shifted focus.
The entire shortwave medium itself, thanks to The Great Politics Mess-Up. During the interwarperiod, Americans, fearing for relatives overseas (many Americans at this time were still first- or second-generation immigrants), bought shortwave radios en masse to tune into foreign news broadcasts. During World War II, shortwave was the only place where people in occupied Europe could get news that wasn't filtered through Nazi censors, and the onset of the Cold War caused Western countries to keep funding their shortwave networks in order to broadcast to those behind the Iron Curtain. The Voice of America, the BBC World Service, Radio Canada and Radio Netherlands in particular became well-respected Western news sources, causing the Eastern Bloc to respond with shortwave stations of their own. Meanwhile, non-aligned countries like Libya and Albania broadcasted their own ideological rants to anybody who would listen.
But then the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, and suddenly the public need for shortwave broadcasting was nowhere near as great as it had once been. Around the same time, the FCC allowed religious broadcasters to operate shortwave stations. Before long, many of these religious broadcasters realized that there was a lot of money to be made in selling their shortwave airtime, and the shortwave bands were quickly buried under a tidal wave of conspiracy theorists, religious fanatics, "Christian Patriots", and worse.
Due to budget cuts, the BBC World Service has become this. First, citing the Internet, it stopped shortwave service to North America; then, it cut most of its fine arts/entertainment programming; now, it airs mostly all-news all the time.
In all fairness, a lot of their English-language content was first broadcast on Radio 4, which is now available worldwide through the internet.
WRNO New Orleans billed itself as "The Rock of New Orleans." Then it started playing mostly "Christian Patriot" programming. Then... well, Hurricane Katrina killed it by destroying the transmitters.
WWCR was originally "World Wide Country Radio," broadcasting from Nashville, Tennessee. Then it became "World Wide Christian Radio," playing Christian/Christian Patriot programming almost exclusively, with the original country radio block being maybe an hour a week if you're lucky enough to find it.
Similar to the above music examples, KUSW in Salt Lake City was originally a rock station, and then it very quickly became the shortwave arm of the Trinity Broadcasting Network and became KTBN. The station is now defunct.
Yet another music example: WNYW was first started as an educational shortwave station (in 1931!), then became, with World War II, an outlet of the British secret service. Later it was turned into a music station by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Then it was sold to Family Radio, controlled by the now-infamous Harold Camping, and has been WYFR since 1973.
TCM's Aversion
While there are plenty of networks that have managed to avoid Network Decay, there is one particularly notable aversion: Perhaps as a response to the dearth of older films on television these days, Turner Classic Movies seems intent on avoiding a shift in their purpose. Movies from 1980 onward are rare, and usually shown to fit a theme block with the older movies (in particular the "31 Days of Oscar" promotion in February/early March, where any movie that had at least an Oscar nomination can qualify for an airing). They now have films largely (if not completely) abandoned by other movie networks — silents, international classics, live-action Disney films from the 1950s-70s, cult titles for its TCM Underground block, vintage one-reel shorts and old promotional featurettes as interstitial programming, etc. Plus, they're good about letterboxing, pillarboxing, or windowboxing when necessary (to the point of producing and frequently airing an educational short explaining to non-cinephiles how aspect ratios work and why letterboxing is a good idea).
They're also very good about presenting stuff in monochrome if it was originally produced that way...which is kind of ironic, given that the man who founded the channel (Ted Turner) was at one time the most notorious proponent of "colorizing" old B&W content.
It has some original shows, but all of them are documentaries about classic films, from one about the history of early sci-fi films to a long interview with Woody Allen about all of his films.
It should also be noted that TCM's birth came about because of TNT's programming shift towards general entertainment. TNT was Turner's first classic movie channel. Perhaps there's a lesson here...
Even more impressive? In a World where every basic cable channel seems to be about "maximizing profit" and squeezing commercials into every nook and cranny (so that you won't change channels, don't you know), TCM steadfastly refuses outside advertising *
(the closest they have to commercials are spots for their website, where they sell DVDs and whatnot, and their printed programming guide...and these are only shown between films, never during)
Indeed, the lack of commercial sponsorship is one of the reasons TCM can have the format it does. A channel that's beholden to sponsors (and thus to chasing the fabled 18-34 demographic those sponsors lust after) probably can't get away with showing hour after hour of forgotten, decades-old movies in black and white.
TCM arriving in Argentina arguably caused the Argentinian channel Retro to decay. Because of TCM, Retro now rarely shows old movies, and the only old movies they show are the ones in color. In the U.S., AMC's decay, listed under "Slipped", was due to pursuing a younger demographic.
They've begun to show films from after 1980 with more frequency, but again mostly during theme blocks or when there's a special guest programmer for the night, who discusses why they picked the movie before and after it airs. Still, it's usually around one post-1980 movie a week, and it's often one with massive critical acclaim. (This will only become more fair over time, since 1980 is now over 30 years ago and Time Marches On along with their cut-off date.)
TCM is also the last film network that has knowledgeable on-air personalities introduce a film before its airing. Film historian Robert Osborne, who has been with the channel since its beginning, is the most famous of the two — he does introductions and outros for the films that air prime time every day (and a new one each time a film is shown, too, as TCM's prime time schedule often features a loose theme). Film critic Ben Mankiewicz is the other. He presents a handful of films that air during the daytime and on the weekends (although his aren't new for every episode).
In-Universe Examples
Fictional example: UBS, the TV station from Network, which shifts from a regular channel, to a sensationalist channel, complete with a Reality Show following the steps of a guerrila group.
