The Game Show Forum > Game Show Channels & Networks
It's 4 a.m.....
sshuffield70:
Well, what's the time difference between Hawaii and New York? IIRC, it's a 7 hour difference. So, at 4AM, it's 9PM in Hawaii. That might be another reason.
tommycharles:
[quote name=\'CaseyAbell\' date=\'Apr 21 2004, 01:06 PM\']
The admin said that GSN had to put the screens on the air to test the interactive gadgetry. No doubt they selected their lowest-rated hour (except for the infomercials, of course) to run the test.
Also as you might expect, the first show mentioned in the release is...Millionaire. You might call Regis' epic The Show That Saved a Niche Network. Or...Who Wants to Survive on the Fringes of Cabledom?
[/quote]
Were the pre-Millionaire ratings really that bad? What did they do that killed the ratings, exactly?
CaseyAbell:
The numbers got pretty awful, allright. I listed GSN's rating history from the old CableWorld site in a post that should still be in the search cache.
Basically, GSN's numbers had been trending flat to down throughout 2003, with a one-time upward blip thanks to the PYL Big Bucks documentary. Things really got ugly in late summer, when the network often fell out of the top 40 ad-supported cablers altogether. (CableWorld only listed numbers for the top forty, and GSN was often nowhere to be found.)
That's why the enormous shakeup in prime time occurred. ALL of the Boden originals except Lingo got banished to the far reaches of the schedule or axed completely. The network paid whatever it took to pry Millionaire loose from ABC's clammy digits, and bet the house on three shows in prime time: the aformentioned Regis epic and proven warhorses Match Game and Lingo.
Voila, as the froggies say (apologies to froggies everywhere). The network bounced back nicely in prime time household count in January and February this year, according to stories in Variety and MultiChannel. The demos were still what you would expect: old, female, lower-income. But at least the network had SOME audience again.
So now they're trying non-trad stuff at 10:00. This doesn't seem to be doing all that great if hints on various web sites are to be believed...with the exception of blackjack, which apparently is getting halfway decent numbers. We await further developments in Days of Our Niche Network.
Oh, on another note, GSN doesn't have a separate Hawaii feed, of course. So they had to put the Millionaire one-screen interactive version up for everybody. I'm sure that's why they picked the miniscule-rated (is that a word?) 4:00 AM Eastern hour.
Now that I mention it, I'm a little intrigued by the one-screen idea. Don't know when, if ever, the experiment will get to my part of the cable woods. But it might make teevee viewing a little less dumb-dog passive. Setting up on a computer to do interactivity is something I'm not interested in, but running things off the remote might be fun.
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