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Isn't TVGuide The WORST Magazine Ever ?

C

Casablanca

Guest
TVGuide's subscription rate as well as its over the counter sales must have plummeted in the year or more of its tabloid trash format.

How much longer will it survive. It no longer has local or regional listings only national.

The "Info" listings on Comcast are far better and more accurate. Why would anyone ever need to buy TVGuide again? If you want trash tabloid there are a half a dozen other rags that probably do it much better.

The fact that no other publication is trying to enter the TV listing market on a national scale seems to be evidence that the TVGuide magazine is "listing" to the starboard and will soon sink beneath the test patten.
 
I think it's because it's sort of obsolete. My favorite TV listings site is Zap2it.com. It's very accurate, and it will list all the cable channels your system has if you type in your zip code.
 
Casablanca said:
TVGuide... How much longer will it survive... The "Info" listings on Comcast are far better and more accurate. Why would anyone ever need to buy TVGuide again?
Click to expand...

When someone says Comcast offers a better service than you, THAT is an insult! ... WOW! :eek:
 
I chuckle to myself every time I go through the checkout at my local supermarket.

Why?

Because TV Guide is being folded to "fit" into it's original wire rack when it was the smaller size.
 
I agree with you all, but one thing you have to remember is a lot of people 40-50% still do not have highspeed. It takes a LONG time for those listings on TitanTV and such to appear on dial-up.
 
Casablanca said:
TVGuide's subscription rate as well as its over the counter sales must have plummeted in the year or more of its tabloid trash format.

How much longer will it survive. It no longer has local or regional listings only national.

The "Info" listings on Comcast are far better and more accurate. Why would anyone ever need to buy TVGuide again? If you want trash tabloid there are a half a dozen other rags that probably do it much better.

The fact that no other publication is trying to enter the TV listing market on a national scale seems to be evidence that the TVGuide magazine is "listing" to the starboard and will soon sink beneath the test patten.
Click to expand...

So? Don't buy it.
This is old news, very old news. This was long discussed on the board already 2 years ago when they went to this format. We all hate the new format, but its here to stay, unless they wise up but there are no local printers for it anymore, so I suggest we move on already...

I usually get TV Guide and then my local Sunday paper which has a local TV insert, and that gives me everything I need.
 
Does anyone even buy the thing any more? I have never seen anyone do so since the format change. It went from being a nostalgic favorite, which was easing into irrelevancy to a totally useless bit of rubbish.

Clearly, this was a case of assisted suicide.
 
TV Guide should be put out of its misery. It has been living on borrowed time for many years now.

Sad to see how far it fell; back in the 60's and 70's it was actually a quality publication with intelligent articles about all kinds of media related topics and people. It seemed to go swiftly down the toilet in the mid-80's after an ownership change.
 
United said:
TV Guide should at least have local listings in the top 10 markets.
Click to expand...

That's impractical on numerous levels. They had a choice a few years ago--keep bleeding money on regional editions and the associated expense of that process, or try stemming the tide by being a more traditional, albeit TV centric, entertainment pub. There was at least a chance of cracking into the market with the light-and-fluffy celebrity approach, since there is a proven and seemingly bottomless market for that (case in point: TMZ getting a TV show this fall), but zero chance of remaining viable the old way.

Suppose it's your money at stake. What do you do? (I seriously doubt "nostalgia" would get many votes if you're truly honest and look at it from an objective business standpoint.)
 
imhomerjay said:
United said:
TV Guide should at least have local listings in the top 10 markets.
Click to expand...

That's impractical on numerous levels. They had a choice a few years ago--keep bleeding money on regional editions and the associated expense of that process, or try stemming the tide by being a more traditional, albeit TV centric, entertainment pub. There was at least a chance of cracking into the market with the light-and-fluffy celebrity approach, since there is a proven and seemingly bottomless market for that (case in point: TMZ getting a TV show this fall), but zero chance of remaining viable the old way.

Suppose it's your money at stake. What do you do? (I seriously doubt "nostalgia" would get many votes if you're truly honest and look at it from an objective business standpoint.)
Click to expand...

I'd bet that they chose poorly. I recall that they expected to lose something like 2/3 of their subscribers with this move - and they planned to be marginally profitable with that number. From what I hear, the loss was much worse than that. The mag went from gradually becoming irrelevant to taking the express route. By pleasing no one.

A more gradual approach may have been wiser. They did it in a way that spit in the face of most subscribers/readers, without attracting any of the younger airheads that they are aiming for. Lose-lose.

So, if it were my money - NO, I would not have done what they did.
 
To be guaranteed of losing money (to make it clear, they were) slowly is not better business than taking a stab at a turnaround strategy (which didn't work out, but such is business. Dying on the vine vs ripping out the plant...pick your analogy.

With the advent of digital cable services and the growth of the Internet, local listings in print had their days numbered. The real value in TV Guide is its database of info about nearly every TV show ever made (at least at a national level). The more "classy" articles had their place in a different era, but they were gravy on the meat, i.e. the listings. Those listings had to move to other platforms with the exploding number of channels out there, not to mention on-demand technology.
 
TV Guide began to recognize a potential problem
when cable began to take off in the early '80s:
how to incorporate all those new channels and
keep the magazine from reaching the size of the
Manhattan phone book. I think, with the benefit
of 20/20 hindsight, that the handwriting was on
the wall for the TV Guide we boomers grew up with
as early as 1980. And Rupert Murdoch, to me at least,
seemed to use the magazine simply to promote Fox
shows.

With newspaper weekend inserts, titantv, Zap2it,
and all the rest, we don't need TV Guide. We can
get practically the same information in People or
Entertainment Weekly. If TV Guide disappeared
tomorrow, I doubt if very many people would miss it.
 
Under current ownership it appears as if that's the case. A better way to kill off an entity rapidly is to kill it slowly.
 
bpatrick said:
And Rupert Murdoch, to me at least,
seemed to use the magazine simply to promote Fox
shows.
Click to expand...

That's the truth. When Rupert Murdoch owned "TV Guide", the caliber of the articles in the magazine plummeted dramatically. Prior to his ownership, one of the things that I liked about the magazine was the wide range of TV-related subjects that it covered -- everything from celebrity profiles to discussions of regulatory issues (ie, the all-channel act). There were also some very offbeat "human interest" stories that were fun to read, such as the guy who went on air to beg his viewers to loan him money to keep his station afloat (Ted Turner, prior to the superstation years) or the efforts of folks in a small California desert town to receive off-air TV broadcasts.

After "TV Guide" was sold to Murdoch, about the only stuff that was left was the fluff...celebrity profiles and the like. In my opinion, that was a mistake because it narrowed the number of readers who would use it as anything more than just a source of program listings. That, in turn, eliminated some of the difference between reading "TV Guide" versus the local newspapers' Sunday insert. And, as I recall, that is also the period when "TV Guide" started seeing sizeable circulation losses.
 
If this magazine wised up, they would discontinue their publication, and take
everything online.
I noticed there you can get your local and cable television listings.
How accurate?, that depends how you look at it, but i agree with some about
zap2it.com, good web page for television listings.
 
I think Zap2it is the best TV listings site. I've looked at my own lineup on all 3 sites, and Zap2it is by far the one that is most accurate. There have been some HD channels added recently, which Zap2it is listing, but TVGuide.com and titantv are not.
 
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