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Here's a video from dl.tv: http://dl.tv/2008/01/ces_2008_microvision_show_proj.php

There's no mention of battery life, and it looks like the framerate might be terrible, but it's a real product!

Bittorent doesn't allow for tracking downloads. It's one of the things that really holds it back for general use for a lot of companies. For example, a lot of internet TV shows would LOVE to use bittorent to reduce their download overhead (which is HUGE), but how are they supposed to determine their "ratings" if they're not sure how many donwloads they've had? They used to talk a lot about this over at DLTV.

-Eric

For the best msg. of why it died, see this note:

http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=192849&thr eshold=2&commentsort=3&mode=thread&cid=15828882

In the meantime, Ziff Davis has been trying to bring back the TechTV flavor on a minute budget with DigtalLife TV

http://dl.tv/blogs/digitallifetv/default.aspx

for tech fans by tech fans.

Truth in advertising, I'm a Ziff editor, but I've got nothing to do with this project, except I think it's cool and it's as close to TechTV as you'll find these days over the air or online.

Steven

The story of TechTV began with the MSNBC show, The Site which starred Soledad O'Brien and a computer generated character, Dev Null, who was voiced and controlled by Leo Laporte. I never saw the Site, but TVNewser has a good overview of the show.

After the Site was cancelled, came ZDTV which was owned by Ziff Davis. When Ziff Davis sold the channel to Paul Allen, they changed the name to TechTV.

During that time G4 was started. Owned by Comcast, they bought TechTV and merged the channels calling it G4TechTV, closing down TechTV's San Francisco studio and cancelling Call For Help. From the start there were signs that buying TechTV was simply a way for Comcast to get G4 into more houses by canibalizing the audience of TechTV. They did not offer ScreenSavers host Patrick Norton a contract and while they initially were going to have Leo Laporte appear in pretaped segments, they never actually did that. They also cancelled Fresh Gear and all of TechTV's other shows except for the ScreenSavers and X-Play. Then several months later, G4 dropped the "TechTV" and any pretense that they were going to continue having any technology focus.

After a few months, the Canadian version of G4 offered to hire Laport and begin to tape new episodes of Call For Help, informally called Call For Help 2.0. In August of 2005 the US G4 began to air Call For Help 2.0, but early in the morning with little to no advertising. After several months it was taken off the air. It is still airing in Canada and on the How To channel in Australia. Recently, it has been made available for purchase from Google Video in the USA and is easilly found on torrent trackers.

Now G4 has begun airing Star Trek:TNG and the original Star Trek, as well as the Man Show and Fastlane and increasingly decreasing videogame coverage. Many people have begun to call G4 a SpikeTV clone.

In brighter news, many TechTV alumni have gone on to particiapte in online podcasts and vid casts such as This Week In Tech, dl.tv, Cranky Geeks, Hook Me Up and The Chris Pirillo Show which, when combined, probably produce more original weekly content than TechTV ever did.

Not exactly, but if you want what TechTV was go here and then poke around. You'll end up finding Revision3 and DL.TV. Don't bother about what happened. Just enjoy what has resulted. TechTV controlled by the people on the air for the people who liked to watch it.

It doesn't really matter what happened to the name 'techtv' because the best part of the station is still alive and well in webcast form. Check out http://www.dl.tv/ its pretty good for hearing about new gadgets coming out and getting the 'big news' of the day. Plus its free!

I too mourned the death of TechTV, but I no longer miss it.

I now watch DL.TV and TWIT.TV, which gives me about 80% of what I got from TechTV.

True, it was convenient to have everything gathered on one cable channel (if you ignored all of the useless repeats), but I'd argue that the natural environment for TechTV's content is the web. Plus, now, using a good RSS feed reader, you can roll your own TechTV. Can't you do that with TIVO and Freevo now?

Now, all we need is for Joshua "Yoshi" DeHerrera to start up a modding video podcast then all will truly be right with the world, with all TechTV goodness gathered on the web, in nicely downloadable / streamable gobbits.

Check out DL.tv, an online tech show hosted by Patrick Norton (of former "The Screen Savers" fame") and Robert Heron. Episode 72 shows off the function. It's pretty cool. It's a lot of eye candy, but it is pretty stunning. And supposedly, it's running on a not-too-state-of-the-art video adapter, illustrating how the implementation, unlike Windows Vista, doesn't require the highest-end hardware.

Check out DL.tv, an online tech show hosted by Patrick Norton (of former "The Screen Savers" fame") and Robert Heron. Episode 72 shows off the function. It's pretty cool. It's a lot of eye candy, but it is pretty stunning. And supposedly, it's running on a not-too-state-of-the-art video adapter, illustrating how the implementation, unlike Windows Vista, doesn't require the highest-end hardware.

I, for one, ditched G4 right after they killed TechTV. IMHO, Leo and Patrick and Kevin have much better and creative shows now. (Uh, minus Martin Sargent, who's a tool).