Matt Haughey of PVRblog pointed out that the Los Angeles Times has published an article declaring the television rerun dead. I’m with Matt when he says that the end of reruns as we knew them is a good thing, and that Digital Video Recorders like TiVo played a role. I have a few suggestions for the new world order:
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Repeat all of the prime time shows on a predictable schedule during the overnight period.
NBC ran a few week-old episodes of The Apprentice on Wednesdays, and this was said to be an attempt to “build awareness” of a show. In addition to doing that, encourage affiliates to re-run the entire prime time schedule from 2:00 to 5:00am, so that one-tuner DVR users can resolve some conflicts.
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Get rid of the program expansion gimmicks.
I’ve pointed out on several occasions that the network programmers played games with their schedules in order to wring an additional station break or two out of the finales of Friends and Frasier, and did it more often with shows like ER. This rendered TiVo Season Passes rather meaningless at times, forced DVR users to study the schedule to tweak their recorders’ settings, and still bits of the beginning or end of the target show were often missed.
One of the most interesting parts of the L.A. Times article is some first run to rerun audience comparisons. Reportedly, audiences for reruns of The West Wing drop 42 percent when compared to the original airing. Audience percentage losses are also documented for CSI, The O.C., and Alias.