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Why Do TV Stations Show Same Movies Over And Over?

13K views 8 replies 7 participants last post by  ExDilbert 
#1 ·
Can someone tell me why all channels seem to continuously show the same movies over and over again? There's so many great movies out there but for whatever reason they don't ever show them or if they do it's once in a blue moon. AMC is one of the very worst for this. I can recall movies they used to show 4-5 yrs ago which they don't show anymore.
 
#3 ·
Stations and networks purchase the rights to air movies from the owners. Let's say a movie station has a budget to purchase the rights to 365 movies for a year. That means each 2 hour movie will need to be repeated 12 times. (365 movies / 365 days * 24 hours / 2 hours per movie.) They may choose to show the most popular movies more often and in prime time. Since the rights are often staggered, they may feature a newly available movie many times in the days or weeks after it debuts. AMC often does this. Once the station's rights expire, they usually are acquired by another station or OTT service that airs them for the following year. That repeats until the movie is so played out that may not be worth airing any more.

Another issue is the limited number of movies available. There are even fewer movies that will be aired due to lack of popularity, unsuitable content or unavailability. Yet another issue is the proliferation of movie stations. As the number of movie stations increases, each station has fewer movies to air and must repeat them more often.

There are exceptions. TCM, for example owns most of the movies it airs. The large number of movies it owns means that repeats are less frequent. However, it also means that fewer movies become available to other stations.
 
#4 ·
@ExDilbert summed it up pretty well. Here are a few things I can add.

Usually a TV channel or an ownership group like Corus Media or Bell Media will sign a multiyear license agreement with a particular movie studio to show a package of older movies on TV. They will have various agreements with different distributors and different timeframes so they can always stage "new" content. That also explains why you will sometimes see the same movie playing on different channels owned by Corus over a few months.

I think I read in the Super Channel bankruptcy proceedings that some movies had a limit on the number of times they could be shown, but I'm not sure if that applies to the "classics." I think it's common for movie channels to schedule a movie for a several times over a short period to let people catch it at a convenient time and put it back on the shelf for a while to prevent oversaturation.

I'd also like to point out that licence rights for old movies aren't necessarily exclusive - the movie studio can license the same movie to different channel groups at the same time. Even if you miss a movie on one channel, it may show up on an unrelated channel in a short time. I clicked on a bunch of AMC Canada movies in Zap2it and found the following examples of movies playing on different channels in the next 2 weeks.

A Few Good Men - AMC and Hollywood Suite
Ocean's Eleven - AMC and SLICE (Corus)
The Hunt for Red October - AMC, Super Channel Vault, Hollywood Suite and HIFI (Blue Ant Media)
The Quick and the Dead - AMC and REWIND (Channel Zero Inc.)

As you can see, the popular movies tend to have widespread distribution.
 
#6 ·
I remember growing up as a kid/teenager, when a movie was aired in the evening that I was not able to watch due to activities like sports or karate or swimming in the evening, some tv stations would re-play the movie at a later time late at nite. I remember setting my VCR to record the movie later on at nite and then I could watch it at my own convenience.
 
#8 ·
CHCH (Hamilton) did better than twice a day. For a few years around the start of the sixties CHCH aired the same movie three consecutive times on the same day (Tuesday). The movies were all premieres for which CHCH had obtained the exclusive rights. Each movie was a Channel 11 BLOCKBUSTER. This was extremely unusual in Southern Ontario where most stations showed a premiere once only. It might be shown a second time later in the week or month but more commonly it would be months between any further showings. The multple showings were one of the ways CHCH tried to present itself as different after it stopped being a CBC affiliate.
 
#9 · (Edited)
In those days, movies were a good way for independent stations or privately owned affiliates to differentiate themselves and get larger audiences. CITY TV and CHCH did many of the same things with movies and were very successful doing it. At that time, there were fewer ways for studios to monetize movies after their initial theatrical release. One way was second run theatres. After that it was TV and small venues such as libraries, schools and, later, repertory theatres. We got CHCH on cable and it was great. The CRTC considered CITY too "urban" for most Canadian audiences and refused their requests to expand outside the GTA for some time. We also got Detroit and Cleveland TV stations, some of which showed movies most of the weekend and, sometimes, all night when the big networks often showed sports and talk shows. In the 1980s, the marketing of VCRs, prerecorded movie tapes and the creation of cable TV movie channels siphoned off much of the content shown by TV stations and small theatres. Streaming is now siphoning away movie content from cable TV movie channels and theatre chains.
 
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