What is your opinion of this network?

I find it has a lot of shows about stuff not related to history. Shows about:

Gun shooting contests.

Crumbling of our roadways.

Pawn shops and salvage yard picker shows. (is this the antique channel?)

Larry the Cable Guy's roadtrip show.

their Lumberjack tree cutting show.

Ice Road truckers.

Deadliest roads show.

People who live in swamps.

What does this have to do with history? What happened to good old history shows?

They do have some good historical shows as well. They focus a lot on what many of us focus on:

Presidents

the Civil War

World War II

Crime history

I'd like to see more history about other periods of history, and more outside the USA.

When they have a good show on, I like this channel. Other times, I look upon it as yet another crappy reality TV network. What do you think?

History shows don't pay the bills. They have to subsidize the history shows with marketable shows. In other words, it operates almost like two networks in one: just tune into the portion you wish to view.

The only other option for them would to go the public network route or get their programming heavily subsidized and sponsored.

Used to be my favorite channel on tv, but as was mentioned I guess there's not much money in it. Around '04 they went super conservative and became unwatchably biased. Now I pass without even checking to see what's on.

Back when the History channel first came out, you could turn it on at any time of day and there'd be classic black & white ww2 footage. Now you'd be lucky to dodge "Ancient Aliens" or nonsense about Nostradamus.

But, the same thing happened to all those channels - The Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel, sci-fi that's now "syfy".

Lol...they must be trying to subsidize the history shows.

If Swamp People is one of the shows the OP mentioned it is rather entertaining. The risks those guys will take to bad a big gator is amazing.

They have what I assume is a sister channel called "History Channel International", where they put most of their actual History shows now. I get both channels on my cable and enjoy a lot of the programming on History Channel International. The original History Channel only infrequently has anything interesting to me. The shows you mention don't interest me.

I also get a "Military History" channel. I don't know if it's related to the History Channel but the cool thing about it is it has no commercials. It fills breaks in shows with short military history blurbs so the shows fill up the hour slots.


PairTheBoard

As others have said, they're just trying to pay the bills.

Ancient aliens....ftw.

It was never any good if you had a broad interest in history and not just WW2/America. At least back then they weren't intentionally misinforming people in order to make the population dumber though.

I actually know a guy who became a crazy person because he watched too many history channel shows. I'm not joking, this guy used to be normal and now he literally believes everything in those stupid history channel shows. Even worse is that he started doing his own "research" on prisonplanet and other conspiracy sites and now he's subscribed to ridiculous NWO 9/11 conspiracies that weren't shown on the history channel.

The history channel is actually turning people into paranoid schizos and needs to be taken off the air before it does any more harm to society.

LOL at guy talking about people's ridiculous conspiracy theories after stating that the History Channel is "intentionally misinforming people in order to make the population dumber".

Anyway, as mentioned before, H2 (formerly History International) is where it's at.

Funny, a friend of mine just sent me this: