Who says this economy's in bad shape? Some investors just paid $300 million for TV listings that they plan to scrap anyway

Macrovision has sold the TV Guide network for $300 million. $300 million! Basically, it's just an endless scroll of listings of what you could be watching on other channels if you were smarter, which seems a nice enough service except for the fact that your cable or satellite operator provides a much nicer and more interactive service that allows you to find exactly what you're looking for far more quickly.

So TV Guide network also shows (in a little picture at the top of the screen) an endless loop of breathtakingly banal celebrity interviews and red-carpet claptrap - it's like "Entertainment Tonight" 24/7, and if that idea isn't enough for you to want to put out your eyes, nothing is. And, the new owners say that eventually they'll phase out the TV listings, so that even the people who don't know how to use the interactive listings service will have no reason to watch. $300 million! And they thought Bernard Madoff swindled people.

It's like dinosaurs investing in tar pits.

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Friend to Your Mayor Alan Sepinwall offers a eulogy of sorts for NBC in the wake of the Jay Leno deal - he chillingly reckons that next fall, NBC may have only six hours of original scripted programming on its air, putting it not too far off from, say, TNT or FX. And he offers this sad but wonderful metaphor:

"(T)he networks are Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff. So long as they pump their legs and assume there's solid ground beneath their feet, they get to keep moving. But as soon as one of them gives up and looks at where it is, as NBC has with the Jay Leno deal, there's nowhere to go but way, way down."