TV Guide Into Oblivion? (Dec 13, 2007)

First they reduced the listings, then they got rid of the local listings, and now it too might be reduced to nothing if a sale by the owner goes through.

Gemstar, the owner of TV Guide, is putting itself up for sale. Macrovision, a security software specialist, has been offered $2.8 billion to buy the company.

While Macrovision CE Fred Amoroso wouldn't elaborate whether TV Guide could fit into his strategy, industry observers are believing that TV Guide could soon cease to exist in this age of 1000 channels and free Internet TV listing websites.

Gemstar is a larger company than Macrovision, and it would have a hard time buying Gemstar unless it jettisons TV Guide. Gemstar has 1,600 workers while Macrovision has 760 workers.

In 1988, Fox Broadcasting parent News Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch purchased TV Guide (so it could vertically promote its Fox Network) from Triangle Publications in a $3.2 billion deal. The magazine then had a circulation of 17 million.

During the 90s, with the rise of the Internet, satellite TV, and fiber optic digital TV, TV Guide didn't keep up with the demand for more channel listings. Titan TV and others sprang up to offer listings for channels TV Guide omitted from their listings.

In 2002, News Corp. absorbed an $11 billion charge to reflect TV Guide's crumbling value.

So what happened next? From 2002-2005, the magazine decided to reduce its listings piece by piece, eliminating the late night and weekend morning listings and made most of the listings into an unreadable grid. Even worse, when they should have doubled the size of the magazine and TV channel listings, they doubled the size and eliminated the local listings altogether, making it as wothless as bird cage lining.

As for the circulation? It's never been worse than now. It dropped from 8.2 million to 3.3 million readers. That's over a 80 percent drop from 19 years ago, and about a 60 percent drop from 5 years ago. It's hard to believe that a company could be that ignorant of today's demands of the TV viewers. The viewers wanted more listings, and detailed listings at that. They wanted a bigger magazine. They wanted channels that were relevant to their tastes. They wanted local channels listed. The plans for TV Guide's new look backfired worse than New Coke did in 1985. TV Guide blew it!

Soon, TV Guide will be a thing of the past. We now have Windows Media Player, Zap2It, Yahoo, Titan TV, and other sources for TV listings now, providing us details on channels that TV Guide doesn't carry such as the local channels. That's one reason why I dropped TV Guide.

Even the TV magazine in the Sunday papers isn't much better than TV Guide. They eliminated the late night listings, the time I need them the most so I can tape some shows while I sleep. Some newspapers don't carry a Sunday TV magazine anymore and more will soon follow, including the U-T in San Diego by the end of next year.

We could see the end of printed TV listings altogether by the end of the decade. The costs of printing and distributing them is enormous compared to years ago. Even ComputorEdge (not a TV listings magazine), a computer tech magazine, is ceasing publication of its issues and going exclusively on the Internet in January. This is so that they can save the costs of printing the magazine and for the company to survive.

The Internet for the most purposes have made acquiring TV listings easier, but at the same time, caused the old school publications to flounder in red. Will there ever be a time when TV listings could exist the way we want them to exist in print ever again?