Why Commercials?

[boechsner]

I remember a TV Land that was commercial free. They prided themselves in that fact. When I first got Direct TV in September of 1997, there were no commercials on TV Land and all shows were shown uncut with the exceptions of The Ed Sullivan Show and The Sonny and Cher Show. Why over the years, has TV Land been slowly showing more and more commercials and edited episodes of TV shows.

[PPatters]

They've added commercials and edited shows because they realize that classic television shows is simply not suited to be commercial-less. There is simply not enough audience for the show to air without commercials. Even with help from their parent company (Viacom), they still need to be able to make money on their own. (A company is not going to throw money at a cable money that just won't make any money, and a commercial-less TVLand doesn't make that much money, if they made ANY before commercials). The addition of more commercials had to be done, also, to help get a larger revenue, and the future additions of infomercials is meant to do the same thing. While we may not like it, we must admit that a commercial-less TVLand simply wouldn't make it that long, and, well, eventually we'd have to rely on the 8-9 hours of programming we get from "Nick at Nite".