[quote name=\'ChrisLambert!\' date=\'Oct 9 2003, 06:47 AM\']IMy question now is how do we convince Nostalgia Television to make a run at the rights?[/quote]
Hold a seance--they don't exist anymore. (Well, as the low-distributed GoodLife TV.)
As I've noticed before, the complaints I read about GSN resonate with many other niche cable channels scrambling for limited advertising dollars. The most recent example is BBC America, where the British expatriates and Brit TV lovers are currently up in arms over the channel dropping the long-running BBC soap \"EastEnders,\" which had been running as of late on Saturday afternoons as an \"omnibus\" of the week's activities. The reasoning for cancellation, of course, was ratings (along with the fact that the show's expensive to purchase and because of the Beeb's byzantine structure BBCA has to pay top dollar for all of its shows and doesn't get discounts from its half-parent)--and what gets ratings on BBCA beyond the hardcore audience, particularly during the daytime, is the how-to/makeover genre (\"Changing Rooms,\" \"Ground Force,\" \"Home Invaders,\" etc.). The hardcore BBCA audience, who wants to see a wider variety of programming, complains about the overkill (and has a reason for being cynical about ratings, since Nielsen still isn't measuring in its regular surveys the digital tier homes that make up half of BBCA's subscribers), but BBCA says that it's putting on what draws the audiences that attract advertisers.
But despite the complaints from people on its forums and all of the talk of disconnecting the cable or satellite, what BBCA, GSN and the other niche channels know is that in the end, when the hardcore want to get their Brit TV jones beyond a couple of nights a week on public TV or their game shows jones beyond \"TPIR\" in the morning and \"Wheel\" and \"J!\" in the evening, they're going to come back to BBCA or GSN. They may not like it totally, but they'll come back--where else are they going to go?
