TV gained and TV lost (tv)

TV gained:

Conan O'Brien signs with TBS to do their 11pm slot, with George Lopez pushed to midnight. This makes perfect sense for everyone. Lopez's audience is younger, so they'll definitely be in the Conan range, and Lopez will now be part of a duo, which should lead to stronger ratings than a standalone late night show against the networks. Given the NBC debacle, it's nice to see that they all handled this signing very well. Just goes to show once again that the best brains in TV are on cable (and not just the expensive premium cable). To use an analogy, it's like the brain drain from Wall Street (the networks) when many of the young and bright stars left and went into hedge funds (basic cable is responsible for many of the recent Emmy winners and keeps setting new ratings records).

Read online somewhere that the pre-finale show will be 2 hours long for LOST, meaning the full night's programming for that night will be 5 hours of LOST-related TV.

TV lost:

My first iPod blacked out last week and erased everything I had on it. Since I no longer have the original computer on which the files were kept, I lost all the iTunes store stuff I had on it. This included the first seasons of Damages and 30 Rock, and the first two seasons of The Loop, How I Met Your Mother, and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. A lot of good TV lost.

It's weird enough to me that TV advertising still works in this age of the DVR, but why do lead-ins still work? Are people still that lazy to change the channel or look ahead of time to see what might be good on other channels?