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.
