There's time to fill and you're talking about her. That's good enough for MSNBC level cable stations. A test pattern would probably get as many viewers as Joy, but Indian Head test patterns are considered racist...
Also, a lot of the lower tier basic channels were created as a form of leased access programming. Fox News is another example. After the cable TV act of 1992 the only way for cable companies to increase rates was to add channels. This led to full time infomercial channels, various Preview guides and the ability for someone to just buy a channel. Fox was the pioneer in this, they actually supplied all the equipment for the headend and paid cash money to be right next to CNN on the channel card. Microsoft partnered with NBC to create MSNBC as a tech and business channel, but that fell out of favor when MSN failed as an alternative to AOL. NBC was left with a basic cable channel and nothing to put in it (producing 24/7 news is hard). So they made it a dumping ground for opinion and positioned it as an alternative to Fox News primetime.
There's time to fill and you're talking about her. That's good enough for MSNBC level cable stations. A test pattern would probably get as many viewers as Joy, but Indian Head test patterns are considered racist...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian-head_test_pattern
Also, a lot of the lower tier basic channels were created as a form of leased access programming. Fox News is another example. After the cable TV act of 1992 the only way for cable companies to increase rates was to add channels. This led to full time infomercial channels, various Preview guides and the ability for someone to just buy a channel. Fox was the pioneer in this, they actually supplied all the equipment for the headend and paid cash money to be right next to CNN on the channel card. Microsoft partnered with NBC to create MSNBC as a tech and business channel, but that fell out of favor when MSN failed as an alternative to AOL. NBC was left with a basic cable channel and nothing to put in it (producing 24/7 news is hard). So they made it a dumping ground for opinion and positioned it as an alternative to Fox News primetime.
Fascinating. I remember all these goings on, but not all the back end detail.
Thanks!
(PS, I kinda miss the old test patterns!)