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Comcast Fires TechTV Staff
Bocaj writes "Looks like it's curtains for TechTV staff. A Leo Laporte article says that Comcast has let the entire staff go. 'Per the WARN Act (governing plant closings) all the employees of TechTV have been given 60 days notice. The San Francisco operation will be shuttered by July. 100 of the existing jobs will be posted for those willing to relocate to LA.' No word on what will happen to all the shows or the channel."
At least it's only being moved to LA, and not, like.. India.
For taking my favorite channel off the air.
I'm sure it will be replaced with something highly mediocre. Weren't they thinking of combining G4 and TechTV? Now its just going to be G4? I've personally tried to watch G4 and couldn't do it.
I don't understand why they would can the entire network.
Well, now that TechTV is gone, I've got no reason to keep the digital cable around, everything else I want is on basic cable.
TechTV will likely be merged with G4, a gaming channel. The new channel will have a little bit of both channels' content but will be more slanted towards gaming. Comcast bought TechTV a while back and has probably been planning this for a while.
Just thinking out loud here... A Slashdot Channel would actually be pretty informative, covering lots of different aspects. Maybe even have guest Slashdoters invited to cover stories not covered already on the front page.
Then again, with TechTV's fate, maybe it wouldn't be such a success afterall.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
- i was on TechTV a couple years ago... the publisher flew me out to SF and i got to take a cab to the studio... - the TechTV folks were very friendly, and Leo, et al. had a great crew... fast-paced, lots of good content, and an on-line chatter available in the studio to ask and respond to questions... - but of course, i'd expect nothing less from Comcast, one of the worst and most expensive cable companies in existence...
Since I watch the Screensavers I usually go to the Screensavers website and look up stuff in the show notes. Sometimes months later... There's alot of good info in there.
I like microcars
Just for the record, (as a wikipedia admin) the TechTV people vandalized our article on monkeypox live on the air, and it has been a vandalism-magnet ever since. But it is a shame that they are cancelled - although I don't get them where I live, from what I hear, they did some good stuff.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I'm wondering how many of the Slashdot crowd actually watched Tech TV?
:( I still think there is room for a technology-oriented television channel but not yet. I don't know about USA but here in Canada, Tech TV was a digital channel so until digital boxes are almost standard, I don't expect these digital channels to take off...
I never subscribed to it, over here in Canada, but watched the free promotional period. It was certainly different from the typical stuff on mainstream tech shows. I wasn't a big fan of the channel since I am not into tech as much as the rest of you here.
I guess this is the last remnant of the dot-com boom
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
How about Slashdot getting the funding to create a Slashdot TV channel and hire the fired Tech TV staff. ;)
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
"Body Hits" and "Nerd Nation" were pretty good shows -- I never much cared for "Spy School" or "Consipracies" however. If I had my way with their line up (yeah I know your glad i dont)
I would have
-xplay
-nerd nation
-body hits
-screensavers
and I'd lose
-conspiracies
-spy school
-robot wars (that guy is sooooo anoying)
and I could go either way on
-anime
-call for help (why not)
-fresh gear
-tech live
meep
I may not qualify as "anyone", but as it happens, Yes I do believe Comcast is that stupid.
They have effectively told their employees: "Hey, we love what you have done. We don't need you, and we are disolving this channel you have created. Some of you can apply for your old jobs back, but the descriptions may change, andy you will have to move to LA. It's been great working with you."
Tell me that _You_ would feel that moving from SF to LA on the possibility that you _might_ get a job with the same title as you had before, is a good idea.
You never know...
What mostly amazes me is that Comcast intends to replace TechTV with G4.
Great idea guys, replace one hardly watched niche network with an even less watched niche network.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
Hmm, I think we can see why at least one employee would be "let go"... Reading your coworkers' AIM conversations and talking about it on TV would probably do it (watch the video clip). Stumbling their Wifi access points might have something to do with it, too...
I wonder what will happen to the channel's availability on DirecTV once they complete the merger... Do you think Comcast will continue to make the channel available to one of their biggest competitors?
Yeah, I've been a fan for the last year or so, while there was a lot of stuff that wasn't relevant to me, I learned a lot, and was exposed to things that I hadn't thought were relevant. Kind of nice to hear media slamming MS, or complaining about how hard an install was(away from slashdot anyways).
Made for great background noise to studying. I'm hoping that some of these people get hired back - maybe another broken show soon??? Otherwise, hope someone fills the gap and we get a bit more geek tv.
There were problems that existed with both networks. G4-TV's quality of programming was quite lack-luster. It's too gaming-centric. There's no way one could fill an entire day's programming with gaming. There's simply not enough out there to make it interesting. Tech-TV had -some- decent programming--the screen savers & call for help, although they were geared toward the lower end of the technologically minded were still half-way entertaining to watch. It's my belief that comcast is simply keeping the "highest rated" shows on Tech-TV and trashing the rest. This isn't going to be good. The Tech-TV shows will never be the same again without the same crew and management. They will go down hill to what G4-TV has become. Now as to what comcast should have done, is to take a couple of decent shows from G4-TV, thrown them on TechTv, and trashed the crap from TechTv. Who really wants to see Max headroom or that one show with those puppets?
They can find other pimple-faced kids to play videogames on TV. Especially in LA, where "aspiring actors" are a dime a dozen.
No need to bring any of the boys and girls from the SF studio down to LA. In fact, they probably wouldn't last a week there. There's a reason they're living in SF and not LA.
Best Buy can have you arrested
It does depend upon when you watched it. There were times and shows that frankly the world could have lived without. Internet Tonight comes to mind. I liked both people hosting the show, but the content was, well, let me put it this way, the show was supposed to be humorous, and did have good talent, but lousy material.
..." series, as well as the documentaries on the leaders of technology.
For several years Leo Lapprot hosted both Call for Help and The Screensavers. I suspect that trying to handle both audiences (the raw newbies, and the supposed non-newbies, but not supertechs) had an impact on the overall level of content in The Screensavers to it's minor detriment. I think when he handed over Call for Help to the garden gnome, The Screensavers improved tremendously.
I never was impressed with the talking heads programs, Dvorak's show on the series was something I regularly avoided. Likewise for Martin Sgt's show.
I did like the "Tech of
In the couple of years I watched it, I can say it did help me with being able to explain some of the things I knew, to people who didn't know anything about what I could have been saying.
They did do several Linux focused episodes, but I would not say that they ever were really focused on Linux. I don't think it would have made sense for them to even have an entire series devoted to Linux, there was not enough of an audience.
TechTV was one of those stations where if you were at a Best Buy, or even a Computer Renisanse, and started fielding questions that seemed below what you felt comfortable talking about, you could recomend to other customers, or even some of the staff.
The saddest moment for me related to TechTV was when they let go of Victoria Recaneo from TechTV News. Granted it was the same day they let go of Dvorak, which partially makes up for it, but it sucked all the same. In my opinion TechTV hasn't been the same since, and that ultimately leads to today's announcement, even though the station has been through a couple of changes of hands since then.
-Rusty
You never know...
And what of the old set do I miss most? The old fridge which doubled as a bookcase. Somehow the geekiest feature in the whole set.
Anyhow, I hope the whole executive staff responsible for these stupid decisions, as a group, fall down a stairwell. RIP TechTV.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
I can't say I'll miss it. I tried watching TechTV on many occasions, but it was just a little too basic. Most of the shows were nothing more than product ads. I was hoping for something more accessible like scripting and programming. A little Perl, a little C, maybe some Bash and Emacs tips, throw in a little CMD and WScript, even some VB. But most of the shows seemed like a cross between the Home Shopping Network and a ...For Dummies book. I can't stand the Thunderbirds, so that didn't grab me. Besides, that's what Cartoon Network and SciFi are more suited to. The pseudo-scientific shows they had weren't much more than "look at how great these companies are at innovating"!. Not too useful. Now, if they would have run Cosmos (with updates), maybe the original UK version of Battlebots, Dr. Who and had some hardcore programming shows, it would have struck a chord a little more.
Un-news
Comcast is my current cable company and broadband provider. Customer service and quality for both are horrible. The previous owner, AT&T, was actually quite brilliant by comparison. All operations at Comcast, down to the last cable splicer, seem to be run from a very high level by bean counters who don't know or care anything about media, the internet, entertainment, hardware, or any of the other things you might expect from a cable/broadband company. Keep in mind that Comcast was the first company to buckle and hand over private customer information when the RIAA showed up with a handful of blank subpeonas, severely violating the terms of service we signed up for when it was AT&T. There was never any public indication that those terms changed when Comcast took over, but they clearly did. So. Do I expect Comcast to do the wrong thing? Absolutely.
Good point, someone DOES need to mirror their content before their site is possibly killed off. There's a plethora of information that should never die off. I've still gone back to look for things on their Internet Tonight links.
Internet Tonight... wow... I miss ZDTV. =(
Most of the time, the show originates from an old barn renovated into a radio studio on his property but just outside of his house. An ISDN line is used to relay his voice back to the studio so he can hear his callers and get the screening data from the producers.
The show presently is only heard on KFI 640 in Los Angeles, but that station streams its content on its website. KFI is owned by Clear Channel, so there is a possiblity that the show may be distributed by the Premire Radio Networks if it catches on. Right now's a rating sweep month... so we'll know shortly how well he's doing.
I work (still) at TechTV, in the IT department. AFAIK, next to nothing from the website is being kept. I know that G4 posted a job for an Oracle DBA to transition our DB to their MS SQL. We contacted them on it and they took the job down (google cache: http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:E3Q1eTpUtU0J:ww w.entertainmentcareers.net/jobid.asp%3Fjcode%3D229 34+G4+DBA&hl=en )
A PHB at G4 has his blog at http://hardwarewhore.com/ Classy, no? Not hard to see that they are going to leave a big, flaming divot in the ground.
I used to watch this show fanatically when it was just Kate and Leo, but as soon as Kate left it just wasn't the same. It seems like since then they've just paraded in a whole slew of different people and none of them ever really stuck with me. Sure, a lot of the new girls are cute, but few of them seem to have Kate's personality.
:)
As far as G4 goes, I don't see why so many people knock it. To me it has the same feeling TechTV used to have (when it was still ZDTV or whatever). For the most part, the hosts aren't just pretty puppets, but actual gamers and in some cases game industry insiders (the guys on Judgement Day). Also, it's nice to see what some games look like on an actual TV screen in motion instead of just as screen shots on the web. Lastly, Icons is a really great show. It's nice hearing about video game history from the people who lived it. Anyway, enough ranting, these rays aren't going to trace themselves
As far as I'm concerned, the flagship show on TechTV was The Screen Savers. When the show had Leo, Martin, and Morgan still, it was the best show on television.
I and many others would disagree. TSS was the absolute best when it was ZDTV and the hosts were Leo and Kate. They worked together wonderfully and Kate is one smart Tech Chick!
After she left ZDTV (after a breif stint on that gamers show) and then Leo gave up CFH (notice CFH is gone in the new schedule) BTW, Leo was replaced by a total dweeb. All he needed was a pocket protecter and tape on the glasses.
Well, after Kate left, so did my viewing ZDTV viewing habit. I still tune in occasionally, but it just ain't Leo and Kate. They were special! Thanx for all the good times guys!
Kate is now in NYC katebotello.net
Robot Wars sucks, Fresh Gear is ok, but TechTV was a cool channel. At least they are keeping Anime Unleashed, X-Play and the screen savers.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
The thing that boggles my mind is that they are taking a (relatively) diverse channel and merging it with one (G4) that has such an even smaller niche audience that it only comprised 1 show in techTV's lineup.
Yeah, that's one of the more ironic parts of this decision. TechTV used to be largely made up of daily content like The Screensavers and Call For Help, which were absolutely useless in reruns a month later ("Oh no! There's a new worm out... hey, that was a month ago!"). For years, they tried to diversify their content so that they could pair those shows up with something that could fill up the rest of their roster with repeatable content. First they tried movies, which failed. Then they tried The Thunderbirds, which didn't last long. Then they finally stumbled upon sci-fi anime, which seems to be working, and paired it with a bunch of new documentary shows that are pretty much hit-or-miss, but don't entirely suck. And now what happens? They're going to become nothing more than a distribution channel for G4, which I'm told has the exact same problem that TechTV had for years -- no repeatable content.
And now that their scope is going to be much more narrow, changing from "TV for geeks" to "TV for gamers" (a subdivision of "geeks"), what are they going to fill their roster with? A new season of Game Over? Maybe some reruns of the Super Mario Bros. Super Show With Captain Lou Albano?
Discovery isn't as good as it used to be, but it's not wholly eliminated... You just have to tune in when they don't have hours of idiots cursing at each other, trying to build a motorcycle... It's scary to note, but that is apparently their highest rated show.
The same is true for Animal Planet. It's been downhill ever since Steve Irwin showed them that human stupidity makes for big ratings...
TLC was the real sob story for me. They used to be a very good channel, until very recently, when they suddently switched into the second "Lifetime" channel for women.
I don't see much good in Biography myself. I could care less about the details of the lives of the Brady Bunch cast.
However, the National Geographic channel is still quite decent, and for the most part, takes the place of the recently fallen channels.
You have got to wonder how much longer any forms of pay TV are going to survive if this cycle continues. Maybe it's finally time for real internet TV...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It isn't just G4 has an even smaller niche audience, it's that G4 has an even smaller niche audience which hates it. I spend time looking at video game news/discussion sites, and G4 seems to be universally reviled as pointless, artificial and just plain stupid among the exact people who appear to be their target audience.
Obviously what I've seen isn't fully representative of the video game "fan" audience, but the thing is that G4 viewers aren't just a minority of the people I've seen-- they've been totally nonexistent. The most positive thing I've seen said about G4 ever is one person on a message board once who said they liked G4 because it made good "background noise". This as opposed to TechTV, which seems to have a relatively large, diverse, and visible favorable following.
As a non-cable subscriber, I cannot comment myself on the quality of either channel, since instead of watching television I just play video games and read Slashdot.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Satellite Dish
Comcast is a sanctioned monopoly here in Baltimore. I finally got completely fed up a few years ago after the tried to (in my opinion) scam me twice in two months, First, they tried slamming tactics to get me to sign up for cable moden (the typical one where the salesperson says one thing and the recording you say 'yes' to says another). The next time someone called and the first thing they said was, "Do you have a computer ?" My wife being the savy character that she is asked, "Who the hell are you and why are you asking me about the contents of my home!" She told the idiot telemarketer from Comcast that it was an inappropriate question and the sucker hung up on her (bad mistake). One complaint to the FCC, and a letter to the local Comcast PHBs copied to our county rep later, and they agreed to never call us again (on paper).
I signed up for DirectTV, then, rather than spend an hour on hold just to wait between '8am and 4pm' for a tech one day, I climbed the side of my house and with a pair of side cutters, and cut the cord (literally and figuratively) with the Evil Empire that is Comcast.
Questionable sales techniques, monopoly deals that overide local govt. (they are fed regulated BTW), higher prices, horrible customer service, receive-only "Internet connections", policies that are anti-customer and dare I say, anti-American ! - why would anyone give these rats a red cent ! At least if they bought Disney I could have focused my distain on one entity for a while
I can only hope we see the return of TechTV on DirectTV one day... Access provider monopolies mixed with content giants is a recipe for disaster.
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
This also gets TechTV OFF of DirecTV. How better to get people from your competition than to take away their channels and put them on a channel that they can't get!
Been what? almost 2 years and STILL no Anime Network on DirecTV, what makes anyone think that G4 will show up anytime soon?
Well, double checking.. it will be on Dish Network.. so, I can watch it when I go to visit back home 2 or 3 times a year.
Well Screen Savers is going to suck without Leo or Patrick. Unless they hire Wil Wheaton. He sure made for entertaining shows when he hosted it. I really watched the show religiously until it cut back to the hour format and 'dumbed down'. Now I hardly ever watch it.
Fresh Gear went downhill after Sumi Das left, and adding Morgan to X-Play (and changing the name/format for that matter) really destroyed the show into a bunch of lame goofy crap instead of a good solid game review show. My income increased because I quit buying games after they changed formats because the reviews were so lame.
I've tried hard to watch G4 but it's like watching my little brother play on his play station and be stuck and running in circles. Absolutely no fun and downright annoying that he won't give up and let someone else have a turn. Never thought I'd say something like again that at 32 years of age. heh.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
I can't count how many times his sense of humor has crossed the line into absurdly Pythonishique territory. It would be a real shame to lose this guy because not only is he funny as hell, his reviews are some of the most trusted i've ever seen. Nearly every game he's reviewed has been dead on with my thoughts. Morgan on the other hand is pretty monotone, and her reviews are not nearly as engaging as Adams. And she has zero humor. We all know what she does have though, and I think we can all agree she needs to pay up for us clicking those links over and over to get her naked in Playboy.
Sigh....
One would think that -- with hundreds of channels -- that *one* devoted to technology would thrive and survive.
I'd beg to differ, though, on the "lowest common denominator" part of your post. I found that over the last couple of years that they tried valiantly to up their viewer base by becoming a bit more formulaic and mainstream in their content.
Still...it was the ONLY place I could go and watch stuff that was actually useful, things I could learn from (or have an "aha!" about something I knew about but hadn't seen) and get a really good feel for some of the trends in gaming, modding, etc.
What really tripped-my-trigger was a discussion a while back about presence awareness (IM, GPS and triangulation) and constant discussions around security, privacy and other issues that are EXTREMELY important as technology becomes more ubiquitous and clueless newbies try things out (like WiFi cafes with no VPN and passwords flying through the air being sniffed by those with a clue).
This might be a good time to read up on why Wil Wheaton quit hosting "Arena" on G4, the same G4 that is now merging with TechTV.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
The pattern appears to be establish niche & then broaden appeal, and appears to be quite established. Witness:
In the end, if you want specialized content, you will have to constantly seek young, new channels. (In HBO's case new pure-movie channels have sprung up.) Those channels need an audience whose interest is focused strongly enough to switch viewing habits. They don't have broad appeal yet so they are not losing anything by showing narrowly focused content.
It's not just TV channels. The same thing happens to Magazines. Remember Byte?