Its a good question.  I don’t know the answer, but I’d guess it has something to do with the price paid to broadcast the movies.  Its probably a lot cheaper to buy the rights to 10 movies and show them 10 times each than to pay to broadcast 100 different movies one time each.  Combine this with the fact that even the most dedicated viewers can’t watch 24/7, so it takes several broadcasts to present the material to every subscriber. 

Of course, this doesn’t explain why their selection of films is often so lousy.

I’ll bet there’s correlation between cable airings and DVD sales for $5000, Alex.

They’ve always programmed new releases like this, even back in the day before everybody had newfangled doohickeys like VCRs.  (Not even big releases.  I remember watching “Roller Boogie” on HBO more times than I care to admit.)  I assume it was originally done to give customers multiple opportunities at different times of the day to catch the big titles that they were paying for.  It’s probably less necessary now with DVR and on-demand services, although a lot of people still do kind of just sit down and watch what’s on and it doesn’t necessarily make a lot of sense to program last year’s big releases.  If you didn’t watch it then, you probably won’t want to watch it now.

I cancelled my premium channels years ago once I finally realized that I literally never watched them. In this age of bittorrent and Netflix, they’re a complete waste of money.

I also imagine that the rights to air the films are negotiated on time limits.  I’d assume that it could get complicated and/or expensive if the premium channels wanted to license hundreds of films in perpetuity.  It would also be harder to cater to customer demand than it is to simply pick 10 recent releases and show them each twice a day for a month.

It’s also a bit of a job to program 700-plus hours of television every month.  It’s simpler to build your schedule around, whatever it is, a dozen or so films/television shows/special events and then fill in with the thousands of movies rather than consider the entire library for every spot in the lineup.  Even a repertory-style network like Turner Classic Movies simplifies the process by setting aside certain times for silent films, spotlighting certain themes or artists every month and giving more time to the most well-known classics that appeal to the general viewer while neglecting the rarer titles that the more hardcore film fan.

Nope, no insight on channels.
But I do have this:
http://punditkitchen.com/

*cackle*
it’s better than lolcats.

If God had wanted people to watch Showtime and HBO, She wouldn’t have invented Netflix.

Seriously, Netflix is very good value for the money if you watch even 2 or 3 movies a month.  I finally canceled our subscription because we were watching far less than that.  Basic problem:  Hub and I just don’t tend to like the same movies, and we’re the only movie-watching denizens of the house.  (The cats’ paws are just not nimble enough to manage the DVD remote.)  We do like some of the same TV shows, so Saturday evening finds us nibbling on pizza and watching recorded science shows or episodes of one of the tamer Sci Fi channel series.

Boring lot, we are.

reticent != reluctant

Nothing to add about the economics of premium cable networks, but I do have insights on “The Ten”:  If you’re a fan of previous “The State” alum projects in the vein of David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer, Stella), you won’t regret watching it. Otherwise, give it a pass.

I continue to pay for HBO because I want them to continue to produce shows and mini-series of the quality they are known for. I don’t particularly care about their movies.

I have Showtime, but only because when I called to cancel it (once the Tudors was over), the TimeWarner rep informed me that since I’d just said the words “showtime” I could get it for free for a year because they were having a surprise deal (for the people who called in and mentioned anything to do with Showtime). So I kept it, but I find myself watching it less and less and though I’d love to see HBO’s True Blood this fall, methinks that’ll be an iTunes subscription.

And yeah, their movie selections suck.

Others have covered the reasons: licensing/exhibition fees; exclusive deals with studios negotiated years in advance; limitations due to film release “windows”; simplified scheduling; and an audience made up in large part of lowest-common-denominator couch potatoes who’ll watch whatever’s on.

It’s been this way ever since the start in ‘80s—brief runs of recent films, mixed with a bunch of what I used to call “cable favourites” (basically films of varying quality they can re-air cheaply again and again and again). The only major changes are that the original series and movies have gotten much better and slightly more numerous’ the original concert, comedy and sports programming has moved to PPV or specialty channels; and the classic and genre movies that used to be premium “cable favourites” have migrated to specialty basic channels like TCM and SciFi.

For me, premium cable just isn’t worth it. DVDs, Bittorrent and PPV let me watch a better variety of movies and series on my own terms than I’d get if I tied myself to HBO and Showtime’s limited schedule and selection. And when it comes to encouraging the production of quality series, it’s more effective to do so on an a-la-carte basis via “on demand” rather than buying a monthly package of good stuff combined with re-runs and filler. I buy the show, not the network.

The cable oligopoly will eventually wise up to the new Internet-driven on-demand reality, but for the moment they’re acting like you’d expect oligopoly players to behave—sticking to the old models and milking them as long as they can while they dither and complain and go into denial about disruptive technologies, new distribution models and changing consumer demands.

What’s their alternative?

They have a certain number of hours of programming to fill every month, and they have to choose something to put into every hour of it. You’re right that they have, essentially, every movie ever made that’s available on DVD to choose from, so it seems as if they could reach the widest possible audience by programming 16 different movies every single day. But the demand for each individual movie - assuming they more or less randomly programmed from among that huge assortment - would be low. There are probably relatively few people sitting up at 3:00am hoping to stumble across “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe” (1980, dir.: Les Blank).

They are competing with the other cable or broadcast channels (and more generally all other forms of entertainment) for the largest audience they can get. Obviously, they’re going to get their largest audience by showing relatively popular movies, not just any random movie. So they’ll focus on films that did well in theaters, and on relatively recent films more than older ones. In fact, they’ll show the latest releases of the big box office hits almost exclusively - because each of those is more attractive to today’s audience than any other movie they could pick. (The recent hits are more attractive than the recent flops, obviously, and also more attractive than older hits that much of the audience has already seen.)

Why do they play them so often? Because each time they play a recent hit, that movie is likely to be the most popular thing they could play at that moment. The fact that they played it earlier the same day does not mean it won’t be popular to the audience that is watching later - it’s largely not the same audience, so, for that audience at that time, that movie is the most attractive option they could offer. Any other choice would be, by definition, either a less successful film, or an older film - and those are less attractive.

To put that another way, any time they’re not playing the biggest, most recent blockbuster is a time they’re letting one of their rivals play it - and then audiences have a choice of watching the big blockbuster on a competing channel, or watching a less popular movie on their channel. Obviously, for any given time slot, the most popular movie available is the most competitive choice to offer against whatever their rivals are playing - so every channel plays the biggest blockbuster it can get its hands on at any given hour of the day.

So why not just play the one, single, most popular movie all the time? A couple of reasons: there is some audience overlap from one time slot to another, so every time you play the same movie again you lose a few viewers who’ve already seen it, and after a certain period of time you’ve worn out your audience for that film; also, even the most popular movie appeals to only a portion of the total audience, so you need multiple offerings to keep the entire audience watching your channel at least part of the time.

The optimum strategy, then, is to show a relatively small number of films, all chosen to be highly popular (meaning fairly recent and fairly mainstream), each programmed often enough that the entire audience interested in that film will get a chance to see it, but not so often that the rest of the audience can’t also find what it wants, and with enough variety that, in the end, every member of the audience can find something they like and haven’t already seen at a convenient time every day. And that’s exactly what we do see.

Basically, they play blockbusters over and over because any time they don’t do so, their rivals have the opportunity to do so, while their only alternative would be to play something less popular. Notwithstanding that lots of people like lots of different movies, there’s never a good alternative to playing the most popular movie available.

There are enough blockbuster films that you can have several major channels all pursuing this strategy and dividing the mainstream audience between them. That leaves indie films, art films, old films, and anything else that doesn’t command top audience share as essentially niche products. They can be concentrated in a few niche channels that maximize their available audience share by drawing the entire audience for that kind of show to their one channel, but with faster rotation of films on that channel because the market is smaller - which again is exactly what we do see.

I have Showtime, but only because when I called to cancel it (once the Tudors was over), the TimeWarner rep informed me that since I’d just said the words “showtime” I could get it for free for a year because they were having a surprise deal.

Heh ... that “surprise” deal came about about a fortnight earlier when the Showtime executives woke up and said: “Holy crap, The Tudors are about to end, the next season of Weeds is at least 9 months away, and between then and now no-one’s gonna stick around to see movies they can rent on DVD and the same cheap stuff we’ve been repeating since 2002. The only way we can keep our subscriber numbers up is to get TWC to give it away for a year.”

TWC might have been satisfied with that scenario 5 years ago, but between iTunes and Netflix and their own increased multiplexing technology and fibre bandwidth the idea of a “premium loss leader” isn’t gonna go down as well.

I don’t doubt it Gracchus, cause I was going to cancel it and then re-subscribe when Dexter came back on. It took the woman a while to convince me that she wasn’t bullshitting me, but yeah, on my bill it’s free but I still don’t watch Showtime.

Does your cable provider not give you HBO or Showtime On-Demand with your subscription?

You’re right that they have, essentially, every movie ever made that’s available on DVD to choose from, so it seems as if they could reach the widest possible audience by programming 16 different movies every single day.
****
To put that another way, any time they’re not playing the biggest, most recent blockbuster is a time they’re letting one of their rivals play it - and then audiences have a choice of watching the big blockbuster on a competing channel, or watching a less popular movie on their channel.

This isn’t how these things really work.  Generally, a given network has an exclusive right to a particular release at a particular time, although there may be some overlap between channels owned by the same parent company.  But Showtime and HBO aren’t both going to be able to play whatever today’s big film is; one will have paid for the exclusive premium-channel rights to the film at that time.  One of the basic-cable channels may then pick up the rights to it at a later date, possibly followed by an even later release on network television.

Similarly, no network can literally show any film they like (and DVD release is irrelevant).  Turner, for instance, has a pretty impressive library of classic American films that only they can show.  AMC used to have a much more varied library available to it until Turner locked everything down.

I was going to cancel it and then re-subscribe when Dexter came back on. It took the woman a while to convince me that she wasn’t bullshitting me, but yeah, on my bill it’s free but I still don’t watch Showtime.

Exactly. It’s a sad holding action, and the only party who loses is Time Warner Cable. They only do it because they’re still working on their infrastucture build-out (e.g. new set-top boxes installed base, kerb-to-residence fibre) and marketing.

Eventually TWC is going to tell Showtime/TMC (and Cablevision and Comcast will tell HBO/Cinemax): “Enough of these middleman games. You want to produce quality series and original films? Great—we’ll buy ‘em if they perform, just like we’ll buy feature films directly from the studios. But now that we have enough markets enabled with on-demand technology, we’ll be doing the final distribution, and we’ll be replacing your channel slot with 24/7 re-runs of The Hills and infomercials.”

You’d think that Showtime Networks would be prepared make the transition smoothly, but these are media companies, and that industry has some of the most spectacularly incompetent, complacent and short-sighted management in America.

Well…  I work for the cable company so I get all the channels for free.  But as far as premium channels go, I watch Dexter, In Therapy… uh…  And since I have the On Demand thing, I’ll watch a movie I haven’t seen before maybe once or twice a month and maybe an old favorite if I’m bored.  But there’s no way I could afford it without working there.  I’d give up cable before I give up my internet.  But yeah, I didn’t want to watch Rush Hour 3 the first 100 times they showed it, and I still don’t.

For a really large selection I’d recommend usenet. It’s fairly good for HD network programs as well.

Dusty:

I’m sure you’re right on the details, but the strategy remains the same: at any given time, they have a choice between showing the most-popular film they have available or some less-popular film. It will never be the right choice to show the less-popular film until they’ve largely saturated their market for the most-popular one - at which point they just shift to the next film down on the rankings list. Turner Classic Movies is a niche channel. Showtime will always be running recent releases because the non-niche audience for those is vastly larger.

Here I thought it was because certain movie studios owned certain movie channels and thus only showed their movies on those channels. Shows what I know.

Actually, I know this is why we don’t have any more NBC/CBS/ABC Movies of the Week, I just assumed it carried over to the “premium” channels, too.

Here I thought it was because certain movie studios owned certain movie channels and thus only showed their movies on those channels. Shows what I know.

That’s true for the networks and basic cable, but not so true for HBO and Showtime

The Ten is just a stupid movie whatever medium you use to view!

I in no way condone illegal activities ::cough:: but a friend of a friend canceled even her basic cable thanks to Surf The Channel. She watched all the seasons of Dexter in a row during one particularly unproductive weekend. That was also where she saw The Dark Knight.

Here I thought it was because certain movie studios owned certain movie channels and thus only showed their movies on those channels.

It often works that way when it comes to the blockbuster hits. For example, unless Skinemax is in dire trouble, it’s a good bet that HBO already has the premium cable rights to “The Dark Knight” sewn up for 2009.

But with the premium channels, sometimes the big self-dealing conglomerates like to mix things up with the less popular films, so it doesn’t look like they’re ... well ... big self-dealing conglomerates.

As movies trickle down from premium to non-premium cable and network, though, the studios usually try to bring the ones from their libraries back under their control if they can.

Showtime, all the way:
Weeds
Dexter
Tudors
Californication
L Word

It’s better if you can split it between roommates, though.  After the three way split, I think I only pay 4 bucks a month, which isn’t too bad considering the quality of the original content.

As a former programmer at HBO, I must say that you basically have your answers mixed in among the comments above.  It would take a while to explain exactly why the programming is what it is, but I don’t have time right now. Suffice it to say that there are many, many reasons why a typical program day or month looks like what Jesse described.