Buzzr leases

[Pyramid20000]

Is Buzzr getting a lease to air more shows?

[Sodboy13]

No.

[snowpeck]

Buzzr doesn't work like that.

[Johnissoevil]

Right now they just want to concentrate on what they own.

/When I read the subject, I thought someone was posting an AFD prank about them leasing Wheel and J

[Chelsea Thrasher]

I explained it once before, and once again:
Fremantle has a giant episode library, and Buzzr as a wholly owned brand and subsidiary, has carte blanche to use that library as they see fit.

But there's a catch.  In 2016, most television operations are wholly digital, with the previous generations of professional media formats mostly as backup and archival media. Virtually all of Fremantle's library are either contained on the previous generation's professional formats, or worse in some cases, only saved in their original 1960s-1980s formats.

There are things GSN never aired because it wasn't worth the time or cost to convert to their preferred format of the 1990s and 2000s, Digital Betacam. (They've since moved to digital server-based storage as far as I know).  This is the case with Buzzr, but on a much larger scale

Some footage needs to be converted to server storage for air. It requires labor hours (which costs money) and equipment costs.  Other footage has to go from older film formats, which is more costly and time consuming to convert. And server storage costs MONEY - and to save video in a quality suitable for on-air playback, you're going to use server space quickly. To say nothing of the labor costs to do it. 

Buzzr runs on a shoestring budget.  Most of their advertising is centralized, and because they're airing on secondary and teritary digital subchannels in the markets they're even available, their advertising pays operational costs as long as those costs are kept low, but they're not sitting on piles of money - and corporate likely wants their operating budget to be as self-sustaining as possible.  That's just basic business.

So, they get on the air with a very small converted library with enough programming for a few weeks.  And as they add markets, and as they get known enough to get 5th-rate advertisers instead of 6th-rate, they have a few nickels extra to spend, and they need to refresh their own content anyway, so a bit more content is converted and cycled in and stored, and they gradually build their own on-server, broadcastable library.

Most digital subchannels have air schedules based around incidental shows that can be cycled in and out with no viewer objections, and  reruns of series who typically have dozens to a couple hundred episodes tops. Westerns, dramas, sitcoms, crime shows, etc.    Card Sharks with Jim Perry, a game show with a moderate run, made 864 shows. It's not Fremantle, but as of today (4/2), Wheel of Fortune will have aired 6,385 shows in just the nighttime run.  That's more episodes by itself than most entire networks have in their entire rotation.

It's just not worth sinking in the money to digitize a hundred thousand episodes of game shows in one go, when you're airing on 27.3 and three quarters of your traffic sales are to medical supply companies and direct marketing, and when you won't be airing 90% of it for potentially years if ever.

Buzzr's business model is low cost and moderate growth, and they're turning a profit AND airing a boatload of neat stuff that not even GSN will touch anymore, and if that's not good enough for people, then too bad.  Old game show reruns just don't have the cache to justify having hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment and labor hours spent on them in initial costs. 

I'm moderately confident that the people who need to hear what I'm writing will either not see it or otherwise not process it, but as someone who knows why Buzzr is doing what they're doing, and appreciates the heck out of a classic-game-show-rerun TV channel being a thing that even still exists in 2016, the last thing I care to see are a bunch of complaints and whining just because yes, they're rerunning that 1983 Child's Play episode again.

Nevermind that I'm fairly certain that for a segment of Buzzr's fanbase, the griping is more that by recycling content to save costs, it's preventing the more dedicated fans from recording all of the content to save for their own purposes and build their own libraries.  Listen, this is coming from a woman whose own collection hovers somewhere around ten thousand shows, so this is not me damning anyone having a library as that would be hypocritical as hell.

It's saying that their operation as a business comes before your own obsessive need to collect, and ultimately, getting obsessive about this and constantly complaining is only serving to make game show fans a market that shouldn't be catered to at all, since their most vocal wings are nothing but ingrates who will just complain anyway.

[Johnissoevil]

What Chelsea said.  Plus, there are those of us who don't even have Buzzr yet.  So be thankful you're even able to access it at all

[Sodboy13]

That is the best explanation I could fathom, and I am smarter for having read it. Thanks for posting all of that.

[BrandonFG]

Great explanation by Chelsea.

Meanwhile, I almost reached for my remote to see if we had BUZZR on 27.3. :p

/At least we still have Antenna TV on 27.2

[Dbacksfan12]

There are things GSN never aired because it wasn't worth the time or cost to convert

OK, I guess I'll ask since I'm curious...I was under the impression that back in the "glory days", GSN literally aired everything from the G-T library.  Aside from perhaps some one or two week B&W series, what did GSN not air?

[TimK2003]

I also agree with what Chelsea said, but I still think Buzzr initially promoted themselves as something they are not....yet.  What many people are ticked off about Buzzr was that they were hyping their "huge" library they own from the onset, which made it sound like they were going to be starting their slate of shows from Episode 1 and going through the entire runs before repeating -- like GSN did when they first lit up -- yet only a smattering of shows and episodes are making it to air.  Had Buzzr not promoted their "thousands of episodes" up front and still only aired the current slate of limited, oft-repeating shows, then they'd probably get a little more respect from the people that can or want to get the channel.

Another pet peeve of Buzzr was, as mentioned months ago on this forum, was that they were not responding to the specific questions as to why they were doing what they are doing.  The generic "Thank You for watching, we value your comments." response is not good PR for any new, growing company that is trying to  gain a decent market share and increased viewership.  Though a lot of technical aspects of Buzzr that Chelsea mentioned would go over the heads of most people, it would honestly answer the concerns that some people have in order to limit the amount of negative vibes people currently have about the channel without necessarily revealing any confidential information on the channel's operations.

Overall, Buzzr is growing its' new channel in a business model that is different than other diginets, like MeTV, AntennaTV and other retro channels or cable networks for that matter. But to the naked eye, they currently look far worse than the other nets.  Hopefully, within the next year, they will compile a sizeable amount of shows and episodes at their disposal, like the other diginets (it doesn't necessarily have to be entire runs of specific shows, but at least a good span where reruns happen only once or twice a year -- not counting same-day reruns). 

[clemon79]

And once again, the point Chelsea is making soars right over a lot of your heads.

There's a lot of people who would like Buzzr to do something or another. But then when it comes down to brass tacks and it's time to come up with a business justification, it amounts to "Because um-um-um I want them to!"

Nobody is presenting a convincing argument about why it makes compelling business sense to do so. And that is the only argument that Buzzr gives a single tin shiat about.

"Because we're the die-hards and they need us and we'll stop watching" is both utter hogwash and not a valid argument. A) they DON'T need you because there simply aren't enough of you, B) you're gonna watch anyhow and everyone knows it, and C) they're not even targeting to you because see A).

They are looking for a random channel surfer who comes in in the middle of a show, recognizes it, and sticks around to the end and watches a couple of ads. That's it. And to do that you run on as shoestring of a budget as you can get away with. Anything they say in their marketing that suggests otherwise is no more or less than lip service because that is what a marketing department is for.

[Thunder]

...

Another pet peeve of Buzzr was, as mentioned months ago on this forum, was that they were not responding to the specific questions as to why they were doing what they are doing.  The generic "Thank You for watching, we value your comments." response is not good PR for any new, growing company that is trying to  gain a decent market share and increased viewership.  Though a lot of technical aspects of Buzzr that Chelsea mentioned would go over the heads of most people, it would honestly answer the concerns that some people have in order to limit the amount of negative vibes people currently have about the channel without necessarily revealing any confidential information on the channel's operations.

...

Those types of questions mainly came from the crowd that obsesses over gameshow programming. I strongly believe that subset is quite hard to please unless they get everything their way. It's really not worth burning what little customer relations time that you have answering those types of questions over & over again.

Buzzr has let it go out of control now that their Facebook page questions are being answered by the same non-company people. Those people can get borderline abusive to the people commenting, so it's turned into a meme-filled circus that makes their customer relations effort look incompetent.

And if you think a new TV startup is going to say "Hey. We're running on a really small budget." well, that ain't gonna happen. That would look bad on the operation and the parent company.

Edited to add: What Mr. Lemon said, too.