Since the Discovery Channel first hit the airwaves 30 years ago with an after-school special on icebergs, the company has staged a surprising transformation to become the world’s king of reality TV, broadcasting a dozen networks with hits such as “Sex Sent Me to the ER” to 3 billion subscribers in 220 countries.
That shift toward guilty pleasures netted the media giant sky-high ratings and tons of advertiser cash. But by pivoting its lenses from snow leopards to naked survivalists and child beauty pageanteers, Discovery began to lose something, too: the prestige it had earned in educational, documentary-style TV.
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