Why is Animal Planet airing

[TZ]

A show called The Haunting? :wtf: I don't expect skeptical or overly scientific stuff but I think maybe something about actual animals on Animal Planet:banghead:

[Odin2005]

1. All "science" channels slowly decay to the lowest common denominator.

Which is woo-woo BS and reality shows. It started with Discovery around 2000 and spread from there. That's how our media works, it's about getting as many eyes to see your commercials as possible, not the intrinsic quality of the shows.

[laconicsax]

2. Slowly? n/t

[salvorhardin]

4. You're exactly right

That's why SciFi changed their name to SyFy. They didn't want to be constrained to just showing science fiction/fantasy programs. They wanted to diversify their program. Which of course blows out of the water the idea that having 5,000 channels would lead to niche programming with advertising tailored to a specific audience. It turns out that the media conglomerates didn't want to spend the money to develop exclusively for niche markets and simultaneously discovered that you could only show reruns of Manimal so many times before people would flip the channel.

This displeased advertisers so they changed their emphasis to shows at best only marginally related to their original programming theme and courted infomercials with low advertising rates. The end result is that now people flip the channel because a) the programming doesn't interest them because it's not why they tuned to a niche channel in the first place or b) they can only watch the same infomercial with the same dead presenter so many times.

And thus people discovered that there was far more interesting stuff to watch on YouTube than on their cable boxes and started opting out of cable tv for fast internet connections instead. Since cable companies can't stand the fact that they no longer have a captive audience they've started instituting draconian download caps that make actually using your fast internet connection for doing all the neat stuff (like watching TV online) the advertisements promised impossible.

[Goldom]

3. But can't you see the elephant's ghostly presence?!

I think that was that show. I could not see it, surprisingly.

[Silent3]

5. According to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Haunted_%28TV_series%29

"the program features ghost stories and paranormal investigations involving animals" (emphasis mine). So there's at least a feeble attempt at a tenuous connection to animals.

It's probably my low vibratory state and third density thinking that holds me back from fully appreciating fine television programming like this.