It’s become a cliche to talk about television’s fracturing audience. Since the mid-80s arrival of subscription based cable channels that mostly carried movies, TV stations have blossomed. This has, in Canada, been helped in part by CRTC rules that wind up creating stations like Fox TV Sport Canada with the Canada appended hanging by that thinnest of threads as a sign that this particular station will, in fact, play hockey games occasionally; maybe some curling.

Some of these stations make no sense at all, though.

CTV NewsNet was perhaps the most bizarre cable licence ever issued: a regular diet of news served up in repeatng 15 minute bites, it was as if NewsNet was defined and determined not to have content. Isn’t news supposed to be about depth? Not here.

The History Channel Canada (that dangling nationalism again) is another I can’t figure out. In the last two days they have shown two movies: Murder at 1600 and Outbreak, neither one of which purports to be based — even loosely — on actual historic events. If the point of the channel is to Bring History Alive why are we watching this kind of tripe?

Examples are endless — I can’t figure out how the TV Series Street Legal or the Hollywood file A Life Less Ordinary, both airing on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, tells the story of Canada’s Aboriginal people — and sadly so.

All these channels and nothing on; makes me wonder if downloading TV shows to an iPod makes more sense than I thought it would. One step close to the dream of having only one channel, with only stuff I want to watch on it.

Posted by skooter at 12:31 PM This entry is filed under Entertainment.