The problem is that SyFy is trying to diversify it's market share by widening it's audience with shows that are cheap to produce... and it's pretty much shooting itself in the foot by doing that. Sure, they play good scifi movies because it was cheap to buy the rights to air that stuff, but they don't take a lot of high risk ventures when making new shows because they haven't really gotten good returns from them in the long term aside from critical success with BSG (which they squandered).
Let's not delve into their tendency to be cheap as hell with advertising for things that they aren't sure will do well (which in turn causes them to not do well).
I agree, but the problem is that while those channels have to produce high quality content in order to justify the viewers' subscriptions, those shows tend to get pirated a lot because a lot of people don't want or don't have the money to spend to get those channels. And when it comes to live action scifi, which costs a lot to produce at high quality, especially if you're doing anything with lots of locations, make-up, VFX, and well made sets, the fact that a lot of people aren't going to be paying to watch the content directly from the channel might make it less appealing.
Of course, there are ways around this, like cutting a deal to have a basic cable channel run the episodes an hour later if they add some money to the pot or moving to an ala carte way of ordering TV channels, but so many people are so invested in the current system that it's not going to happen anytime soon (much like animated one hour dramas).
All the intelligent stuff is going away.
