Stream on

Why not make it four posts in a row about Buzzr? It's a relief to have something new to write about the oldies diginet.

Except I'm starting to wonder how long the diginet will really be, well, a diginet. Buzzr seems a lot more interested in their online outlets than in the TV channel. It's always tempting to read tea leaves. But the e-mail I got today about Classic Concentration prominently mentioned the Buzzr Twitch channel, the Amazon Prime outlet, and the live feed on the Buzzr web site. They even gave a link to the live online feed.

Sad to say, Buzzr execs like Ron Glankler and Mark Deetjen don't phone me daily with their strategy ideas. But the March, 2018 press release on the exec shakeup at Buzzr seemed to hint at a mostly online plan for the oldies channel. In addition, Glankler will oversee and provide strategic insight into FMNA's [Fremantle North America] vintage game show and digital multicast network, BUZZR, as well as the company's overall digital/social media efforts.

In fact, a digital/social media approach for Buzzr seems correct. GSN has such a big first mover advantage as a game show TV network. It's going to be really tough for Fremantle to build Buzzr into a serious competitor as a linear television channel, especially with product that is mostly thirty, forty, fifty years old.

So you might as well appeal to the tiny sub-niche of game show oldies fans (think Game Show Forum and Game Show Paradise) with a targeted online approach. Let GSN get four hundred thousand viewers for new shows like America Says. Buzzr will try to draw the much smaller but fervent group of oldie hardcores.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ratings: Alex has a forgettable week

Image
Another slow summer week saw a new season low for Jeopardy and not much cheer for other syndie game shows. At least most of them were flat. TV News Check has the lackluster household ratings for the week of August 13-19... Family Feud 6.1 - down a tick but still on top of the genre Wheel of Fortune 5.3 - flat Jeopardy 5.2 - down a couple ticks to that season low Millionaire 1.6 - flat Funny You Should Ask 0.5 - flat for the perennial cellar dweller I doubt that Steve Harvey will be too concerned about the tenth of a point. Celebrity Family Feud is still drawing over six million viewers and is heading for a sixth season next summer. A cable note: the latest run of America Says drew 440K viewers compared to 370K viewers for the latest run of Cash Cab . Trouble is, Discovery gets much better numbers overall than GSN. Not a good sign for Ben and friends. Meanwhile, GSN got 415K/272K viewers prime time/total day for the week of August 20-26. The network ranked 34th and 29th in
Read more

Yeah, they were game show hosts

Image
A guy named Bradley Clarke puts some cute articles about game shows on the Interwebs now and then. He's got a new list of celebs who hosted game shows, even if you don't recall their gigs in the genre. As a grizzled old game show blogger, I do remember all these hosts. Though I'll admit that I've spent way too many hours watching game shows which didn't deserve way too many hours. One of Clarke's picks is Carrie Ann Inaba, who hosted GSN's reboot of 1 vs. 100 in 2010. This was a show that I thought did deserve a bigger audience, but my view was not the received opinion. GSN had to cheapen the prize money and production values - this is cable, folks - and that left the reboot open to easy criticism. Carrie was also not the best host, as she tended to rely on irritating catch phrases. Sure enough, Bradley Clarke plods through some of these complaints in his acidic view of GSN's version. Overall, the rewind was hardly terrible, even if it suffered in com
Read more

Marathon runner

Image
Yesterday I was whining that I didn't have anything to write about Buzzr. To be honest, I still don't have anything about the diginet, but I'll sort of make something up. An older-is-better poster on the game show Reddit board plods through the usual complaint about GSN running too much - stop me if you've heard this before - Harvey Feud . But she continues the whine with slams on too much Cash Cab , too much syndie Millionaire , too much Sherriwed, and too much of just about any other show with less than fifteen years of dust on it. Somebody in the cable industry patiently explains to her that ratings dictate what goes onto any commercial TV network. This is true, of course, and it will do absolutely no good with the older-is-better true believer. So how do I get to Buzzr from this? Today Buzzr happens to be grinding through its own marathons. Nine eps of Match Game followed by four eps of Supermarket Sweep followed by six eps of Password Plus / Super Password . I d
Read more