Buzzr has failed us

If you have no idea what Buzzr is, or why it exists, this might not mean a lot to you.

For those of us in the know, Buzzr is a digital network churning out old, dusty programming. A diginet is a cross between an old-fashioned broadcast network and a cable channel, I suppose. I'm no broadcasting expert, but with the switch some years ago from the traditional "airwaves" (that carried our local television broadcasts) to the fancy new digital delivery (which  old TVs need a converter box to receive) it suddenly became feasible for our local stations to carry second, third and fourth channels that are delivered locally.

The biggest diginets nationally seem to be the channels that carry endless reruns of old sitcoms, but there are several variations of them vying for viewership. Some carry lots of movies, some carry one-hour dramas, none seem to broadcast the short, somewhat brilliant half-season run of Jason Bateman's "It's Your Move."

Diginets typically carry content owned by their parent company, often a major movie and television studio conglomerate.

Less than two years ago I first heard about the planned launch of Buzzr by Fremantle, the company that produces The Price is Right, Let's Make a Deal and Family Feud. The company is the successor to Goodson-Todman Productions, a longtime producer of game shows both notable and forgettable. Fremantle owns a variety of properties outside of traditional game shows, and it owns the catalogs and rights of former game show production companies. Let's Make a Deal, for example, is not a Goodson-Todman original, but Fremantle now has it under the corporate umbrella.

Buzzr launched in the summer of 2015. If you were lucky, you had access to the channel the day it launched. Like most startups, it rolled out slowly. In my market, Minneapolis, we didn't get the channel until last September.

As a fan of traditional game shows, I was happy to learn I would be receiving Buzzr locally last fall. Sure, I've had occasional access to the former Game Show Network over the years, but I didn't have a lot of access to it in its earliest years, when it relied most heavily on classic game shows. 

GSN, as it is now known, has expanded its spectrum in a variety of ways over the years, and although its parent company, Sony, is in the game show business, it has relied upon the Fremantle catalog throughout its existence. These days it seems to rely most heavily upon access to every Family Feud episode hosted by Steve Harvey, and it broadcasts those episodes during many hours of the programming week.

I haven't had GSN access in years, and I didn't feel as if I was missing much. To have access to classic game shows all day, every day, via Buzzr was a welcome opportunity. And yet Buzzr has let me, and others, down in many ways.

I quickly learned that blocks of its daily programming are repeated, which makes sense. Nobody is going to watch the network 24 hours per day, so you might as well give people a couple of windows of opportunity to watch Buzzr's core programming each day.

The problem, as we all know, is that Buzzr broadcasts but a few weeks of any one program at a time, and then seems to repeat that block of shows several times. Within a few weeks of watching Buzzr you start seeing the same programs being broadcast. Likewise, the weekend programming seems to recycle programming from earlier in the week. If you watched Match Game during the week, you have no incentive to tune in during the weekend.

I've read analysis of why Buzzr does this. And it makes some sense. Fremantle may own the shows, and it owns the channel, but there's a value to those old programs, and like any good corporation, its divisions have to operate like independent entities. Buzzr can't simply take whatever it wants from the Fremantle library. The value of the commodity has to be accounted for.

If the costs of operating Buzzr aren't being covered by the revenue generated by the diginet, then the diginet is a bad idea. Fremantle knows there's value in its programming, as GSN is paying for the rights to broadcast Fremantle programs, particularly Harvey's Family Feud.

I have no idea how soon Fremantle is looking to operate Buzzr as a profitable diginet, but I have to assume it has yet to reach that point. And I have to assume Fremantle isn't willing to invest heavily into Buzzr. Therefore we see far too many repeats, far too often.

The problem is that Buzzr isn't giving me enough reason to tune in on a weekly basis. I should be able to count on a new one-hour block of Match Game or Family Feud every weekday, for years to come. I don't need four hours of unique Match Game episodes every day, but it's foolish that Buzzr has broadcast countless hours of Match Game since its inception, using the same few months of programming from 1978. Instead of building loyalty to its network, Buzzr is discouraging me from sticking around.

No, I haven't memorized those episodes, but even if I don't remember the exact outcome, I'm not interested in watching the same contestants I saw a month ago.

Perhaps plenty of people don't mind watching the same parade of celebrity couples on Tattletales every month, but knowing there are thousands upon thousands of hours of programs in the Fremantle library, the fact that Buzzr keeps recycling the same 1 percent of that library is annoying, and off putting.

Buzzr occasionally comes up with a good idea or marketing gimmick, yet finds a way to turn some of those into failures, too.

I was following Buzzr's Facebook feed before the channel was available in Minneapolis. Shortly before the channel was added in my market, Buzzr asked viewers which shows it should add from its library to a three-hour Sunday night block. There were six choices, and three would make it to broadcast. I was a fan of Sale of the Century, so I was glad to see that it was one of the shows added.

I was also curious to see Double Dare, a 40-year-old show hosted by Alex Trebek that was also voted into the Sunday night lineup. Monty Hall's short-lived revival of Beat the Clock rounded out the trifecta. Buzzr started showing one-hour blocks of each show twice on Sunday nights. With little exception, that's the only time of the week those shows have been broadcast on Buzzr.

According to Wikipedia, Double Dare lasted just 96 episodes. At two episodes per week, Double Dare doesn't have a deep enough catalog to last for an entire year. But that's fine. It was an interesting enough show that I was hooked. I was looking forward to making sure I caught the one-hour block of Double Dare during one of its two Sunday night broadcasts each week, and it would take me nearly a year to see all 96 episodes. It became appointment viewing.

And of course Buzzr failed again. Just like Match Game and the rest of the weekday offerings, Buzzr trotted out a small portion of its Sunday night lineup and started repeating the episodes. Buzzr turned Sunday nights into appointment viewing for me, and then it decided it didn't need to keep me around any longer.

News flash: There are only so many of us who will sit through broadcasts of old game shows. It's a niche market, and Buzzr is turning away that limited commodity with its questionable business plan.

And as of today Buzzr seems to be upsetting most of those who want to comment on its Facebook page. Buzzr just completed a major juggling of its already suspicious schedule. Buzzr is promising "fresh" episodes from its archive, and is doubling down on its Match Game and Family Feud offerings. (Almost all of its Feud broadcasts have been from the Richard Dawson era. Only for a special occasion will Buzzr trot out a Ray Combs episode, and it won't touch anything produced since the late 1990s.)

The increased Family Feud and Match Game broadcasts might seem like good news, but Buzzr seems to think that cutting out chunks of its previous weekday offerings in order to give us more Gene Rayburn and Dawson is a good idea. I'd rather have a "fresh" variety of shows instead of more Match Game every day. But who needs variety, right?

And while there's an audience for Buzzr's black-and-white celebrity panel question-and-answer shows of the 1950s and '60s, I gotta believe it's a fraction of the audience for old Match Game episodes, yet Buzzr now insists of dedicating two of its three prime time hours to the black-and-whites, which of course get repeated in the following three hours.

Yeah, I'll still stumble upon Match Game and watch, but Buzzr is no longer a go-to channel for me. They've managed to alienate me, and I'm a big fan of a lot of classic game shows. It's hard to believe the channel is failing me 11 months after it was added in Minneapolis. I never would have guessed.

Can Buzzr be salvaged? Perhaps, but I'm not expecting it. There are things that would make Buzzr a more appealing channel, but I don't expect to see any of them happen at this point. In some cases I can only guess why, but I'll try.

One way to fix Buzzr is obvious, quit repeating episodes every four or six weeks. Commit to a "fresh" six- or eight-hour block each weekday and repeat it three or four times. Make it easy for viewers to know when they can find their favorite show, so they get three opportunities each weekday. Eight hours of "fresh" programs each day would allow for the two-hour black-and-white block and six hours of technicolor goodness. Give us an hour of Match Game, Family Feud, Let's Make a Deal, Press Your Luck and Card Sharks, and fill out that sixth hour with one half-hour of Sale of the Century, Tattletales or something else and you'll have plenty of us tuning in regularly. Sure, Press Your Luck will run out long before Match Game, but that's life. Either repeat the entire Press Your Luck run over again at that point or insert a new Fremantle property for a year or two before starting over.

So Buzzr would have to access more of that valuable Fremantle catalog. So what? You have to spend money to make money. Prepare to lose money for a few years in order to make money, particularly if Buzzr is intended to be a viable long-term diginet. If Buzzr doesn't build an audience, it won't make it. And as I noted, it's a limited audience that Buzzr is trying to capture. Most youngsters are not going to take a second look at programs their grandparents enjoyed as young adults.

The more obvious way to generate steam for Buzzr is to draw upon the elephant in its catalog. The Price is Right is nowhere to be found on Buzzr. The show had a short run on GSN, by all accounts, and it is a non-starter on Buzzr. I'm going to guess there are two reasons for it. One, I suspect Bob Barker has some power to control how his episodes are rebroadcast. It's well known he has blocked the airing of old episodes that featured fur coats as prizes. I'm guessing that as long as he is alive, and perhaps even after he dies, Fremantle is a bit handcuffed by the fact that Barker eventually gained executive producer duties for the show.

And I suspect that Fremantle's agreement with CBS limits its ability to recycle past episodes. Even if the Barker episodes are off limits, recycle Drew Carey episodes from the past few years, and use them in prime time. That way they don't interfere with the CBS daytime airing. That would be the single-best way to draw people to Buzzr, but somehow that isn't happening.

Ditto for Let's Make a Deal. The CBS version has been on the air for several years now. Run episodes from past seasons in prime time each night and I guarantee more people will tune in to Buzzr than will tune in to see coma-inducing black-and-white celebrity panels from 50-plus years ago. Buzzr has given us classic Monty Hall episodes of Let's Make a Deal, so the title doesn't appear to be blacklisted from Buzzr. Find a way to to bring Wayne Brady to Buzzr each night, even if it means promoting the new episodes via local CBS affiliates. Business folk like to call that "synergy." 

Casual game show fans have no idea why shows like Joker's Wild, Tic Tac Dough, Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy! aren't on Buzzr. The simple answer is that they're not Fremantle properties, and the assumption is that Buzzr will only show Fremantle programs. There may not be a lot of game shows available for Buzzr to lease, a la GSN, but spending a little cash on the most recent rendition of Hollywood Squares wouldn't hurt ratings, and would give viewers something a little more modern than programs that last aired in 1985. Oldies are sometimes goodies, but not every oldie needs to be 30 years old. 

Buzzr will never be everything to everybody. No matter what it airs, or when it airs the episodes, there will be people who don't like what it offers, or how it presents the programming it broadcasts. But to this point Buzzr seems to be doing just about everything wrong, and if you don't fix something that is broken, it will soon become worthless.