Given the governance of Ontario, they might as well just kill the channel completely and show nothing but infomercials.
While there are other channels now, TVO did show a wider range of films, some historic, some old classics, some foreign, even Canadian made ones, and stuff you aren't going to see on the mainstream channels. Last year SNAM showed Black Book, a Dutch WW2 era film, best film I have seen in quite some time despite being in a foreign language and subtitles. The thing is a film like this is two and a half hours long, for a network to show it they would compress it for time, and then insert over an hour of ads (for a cable network, speciality channels would just speed it up to fit in a two hour time block).
Today's entertainment shows don't discus films, hell they don't discus anything, its just blitzed up gossip, innuendo and mostly a platform for marketing film/TV products, all delivered by plasticized, hyperactive hosts with the attentions span of gnats; I can't change the channel fast enough! At least in the golden years of SNAM you actually had complete dialogue between the host and an actor/director/producer. After Yost left they recycled much of that material into smaller sorter segments for filler but it still was interesting.
TVO has Black Book available for streaming »
ww3.tvo.org/video/167865 ··· ook-2006