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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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
Comcast didn't quite get 100% of the network... Echostar still holds a stake in the network so we're sure that the resulting station will still be on Dish Network. The post-merger network will also inherit TechTV's contract with DirecTV that should keep it there for at least a few years.
FCC rules require that any cable-company owned network that is not exclusively delivered by landlines must be made available to other signal providers without discrimination. So, it's not likely they can play keep-away like they do so with some of their regional news and sports channels.
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
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?
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.
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