Fox COO Chase Carey floating the idea of an all-“Simpsons” channel earlier this week as he spoke at the Bank of America/Merrill Lynch Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference (God that sounds boring…). Carey mentioned that the studio is having internal discussions on how to continue revenue of the ever-popular series beyond just TV and DVD. One of those ideas would be to launch a channel devoted to the series that would air episodes of the series all day.
The only problem with this is that “The Simpsons” is currently under existing contracts for syndication and those deals won’t expire until the show ceases production of new episodes (which doesn’t look like it’s happening any time soon).
I’m not sure how long an all-“Simpsons” channel could run but, if I’m playing armchair TV executive here, wouldn’t it make more sense to launch a Fox Animation channel? That way you could include reruns of “Family Guy” and all those other crappy Seth MacFarlane cartoons plus anything else owned by Fox. Obviously “The Simpsons” would still be the lynchpin of the channel but would allow for some more diversity.
What do you think? Would you watch a “Simpsons” channel or do you think you’d get bored of it pretty easily?