[quote name=\'CarShark\' post=\'206048\' date=\'Jan 11 2009, 06:53 PM\']The only way that makes sense is from the viewpoint that the medium is terminal already, so any effort shouldn't be spent on swimming against the tide, but rather on pinching pennies to draw as much from the existing advertising framework 'til it dies. Then when ratings go down because the audience isn't interested in the retreads, it feeds into the original mindset that TV is dead. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.[/quote]
Or, you can look at it from a businessman's standpoint in which every penny you hold onto right now is sacred. It would have been bad enough if there were just the strike(s) to worry about, but with the recession and everybody trying to eliminate costs, there is very little buffer between a station employee and the unemployment line. So if the top brass at a station want to buy something that eventually tanks, people will be fired without a second thought. The best thing they can do is sit on their money as best they can and run the same thing multiple times. While it may lose advertising dollars, the damage is much less than buying a lemon of a show.
The viewer will greet with this indifference at best and at worst, go somewhere else in a diluted television landscape, which only further justifies the media outlets to not be adventurous, and so it's merely going to get worse and worse until someone is able to change the culture of TV presentation and update it for this/the next generation of viewing audience.
I feel that there will always be TV, because while computers can bring people together, they don't bring them together physically, but that's another debate.
