MTV avoided expensive original programming because stockholders would not tolerate content overhead

Evidence

MTV’s executive programmers thought hard into the 1990s about what they could try without incurring the sort of brutal content overhead that had made life so precarious for other media and which stockholders would not abide anyway. … Eventually the network began running a low-budget game show named Remote Control; with questions based on MTV trivia, it was “an excuse to do jokes.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 819

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: MTV’s free-music-video model made executives balk at paying for any original content — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 822; MTV abandoned music for reality TV once it saw higher ratings. — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 133; Publicly funded TV networks can take creative risks that profit-driven ones avoid — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race…, 1415

Broader Connections

• Publicly funded TV networks can take creative risks that profit-driven ones avoid #corroborates (0.85) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 1415
• MTV abandoned music for reality TV once it saw higher ratings. #expands (0.80) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 133