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G4: The Pong Channel?
CoffeeNowDammit writes "Care to watch other people play Pong? You may be able to do so with the debut of G4, a new US cable channel (via participating Comcast cable providers) devoted entirely to video-gaming. G4 will air a marathon of Pong.. 24 hours a day.. see ball, see ball bounce.. for an entire week. Story is here . What a country." This has got to be a joke, right? A fake press release? Please, tell me it's a joke.
Which alternates between crap and crap with a Manowar soundtrack. The main show they have involves footage from games with 'real world' music dubbed over the top. Either Eurotrash pop or Power Metal, funnily enough.
They've now started to branch out a bit by having 'review' slots, which can be quite entertaining in themselves, having two guy geeks and a girl geek flirting around and occasionally mentioning the games. But they spoil it all by intercutting the real programming with extended 3-minute-plus adverts for premium rate phone in competitions which are apparently their only source of revenue.
It's crap, but it's watchable crap.
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
The press release is no joke - they really are showing Pong. But the reason behind it is because EVERY cable TV network has to test their feed before they truly go live. MOST networks do something boring like color bars with a low tone. G4 decided to be CREATIVE and show Pong for ONE WEEK and everybody gets all over them. The real programming starts on May 1st.
It figures, though. The last time G4 was announced on Slashdot in November, it got a very heavy critisizm that it wouldn't work from CmdrTaco. I submitted the story it was launching 3 times last week and it was rejected. I guess they were waiting for a NEGATIVE story to come in before covering it at all. So I guess Slashdot will be unsupportive of the new network. Yet I bet if they showed Linux all the time it would be hailed as the second coming.
There is a show like this on the network, called "Arena".
One of Slashdot's favorites, Wil Wheaton, is one of the commentators on the show.
This actually happens with a lot of new channels. If you're planning to show something you have to pay for, you don't want to start with real content. If your equipment gets delayed, or you have problems with it when you start, you don't want to be wasting content you paid for. On the other hand, you don't want to pay for your broadcast bandwidth if you're not going to broadcast anything.
So the usual thing to do is to broadcast something really cheap until you know it's all working correctly. Of course, you run into the danger of people actually preferring the fake content to what you actually want to show. (There was one station that broadcast a camera pointed at a fishtank until they got their studio ready, and then people called in to request the fishtank)
No, more like Rocket Arena 3 3rd person view mode after you die, or even better, Team Fortress demo style arena viewing. Imagine being able to spectate on the interaction between multiple players from a distance, instead of watching the game from a single player's perspective.
This is exactly what my show, Arena, does. (I write the show, and I co-host it with my friend Travis.)
We capture gameplay in team-based games like Unreal Tournament and Counter-Strike using observer modes. We use flying cameras to follow the players, and we use some static cameras to capture areas which always have lots of action in them (like bombsites in CS or bases in UT.)
Players compete in timed rounds, and win points for kills and capturing objectives (detonating/defusing bombs or capturing flags.) At the end of each show, we count up all the points and the team that wins gets to advance to the next episode, in a ladder-tournament.
I've been telling my producers that we should get some website teams together, so Team Slashdot could play Team K5, or Team FARK could play Team Something Awful.