Yes, but there's a difference between you gotta spend money to make money and the new practice of if you have money you have money. Even cheating to get more money requires SPENDING money. The people that run things now are just there and just have money to play with and don't play with very much of it. it's like they have such a mortal fear of actually doing something, they choose the cheapest route and it usually is the route that yields the LEAST amount of profit. It's just that they spend so little money getting there, it doesn't matter success or failure (which is usually the latter).
I could get into a WHOLE big thing about FCC deregulation, and how less companies owning more channels leads to less competition (who wants to compete with themselves?) and thus, less choices. There's something about cable that wants to remain kind of competitive so people can still pony up 50+ bucks a month for a stupid wire coming out the back your TV so you'll watched 2 more channels out of a hundred redundant, useless channels. the thing that bugs me is that great TV shows come out of channels that shouldn't have original series all the while channels that SHOULD only air crappy movies until they get a hit (which they run into the ground).