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The Screen Savers Reunited
HABITcky writes "Leo Laporte, Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, and Robert Heron have gotten together and recorded their first podcast of The Return Of The Screen Savers (ROTSS) It's a 56kbps MP3Pro file weighing in at around 14MB. Join them for 34 minutes of Skyping fun as they discuss driving in the dust, cell phones, Kevin's new webcast, Systm, and the demise of TechTV. They plan to make this a weekly broadcast."
Sounds like it might be cool. But not as cool as Slashdot Radio was.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
While I was never a huge fan of the show(back when it was decent), it was pretty entertaining and worth watching. What G4 has done to the channel drives me crazy. I want the old TechTV days back!
US stations have such a knack for taking great channels (or TV shows), and totally foobar them in a vain attempt to 'improve' them.
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....being that they can get Kate Botello to make a few guest appearances. Then it will be a true reunion.
He was what made that show watchable. And, as far as I know, he was the only one with any previous experience in that field. Kevin and the new batch are kinda' out of their element on Live TV, in my opinion.
Leo knew when the guest was becoming uninteresting, and would switch the subject - fast. The new breed kinda' drag on, and commit the most cardinal sin of Live Broadcast: stand in silence.
But, they're prettier than the old ones, I guess. Have to keep the eyecandy on display for their new audience...
What's the point of reuniting the Screen Savers if I can't ogle Patrick Norton?
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
...first podcast of The Return Of The Screen Savers (ROTSS)...
In TFA it's called Revenge of the Screen Savers.
Give me but one firm spot on which to stand, and I will move the earth.
- Archimedes
I used to watch it during 2000-2002. After that, I only watched during sweapstake answers live hour:08 - hour:15 (I still didn't watch the show). After that, as you all know, it went down hill. The marketing geniuses that come from the same pool that keep bringing us crappy movies thought that they'll be able to teach us what quality is, and that they will make a few dollars at the same time. They were wrong, and a good show was destroyed. A little more time passed and the entire station was destroyed. Maybe Leo and Patrick they will make a video show like The Broken if the audio show is successful.
Pretty much the only interesting information show TechTV had, and G4 wished it had.
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I only watched Leo Laporte on The Site. That was back in the early days of MSNBC when they actually tried to do something different.
In those days the motto for The News with Brian Williams was "It's not your father's news program". Then before you knew it, MSNBC was too conservative to be your father's news channel.
MP3Pro??
WTF?
Yeah, I know it is backwards compatible with regular mp3 players, but who just about nobody uses it, or has the "pro" decoder part installed. They should have gone with regular mp3 for backwards compatibility and a second copy with a completely different, more efficient low-bitrate codec like wma.
(Now, who thought I was going to say vorbis?)
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Leo Laporte was the only good talent on that channel. He was a technology fanatic first and a TV host second. He did a good job of hosting, he seemed like an average guy who knew his stuff, and not a phony TV personality. The others either tried too hard to be cool or were too nerdy. It's a shame he had to leave TechTV but I'd rather see him out there on his own than hosting the suckified version of Screen Savers that exists today.
I too am glad they're back, and I truely hope they can keep this up. I wonder if this will affect Kevin Rose who is still working for G4TV on Attack of the Show (the renamed Screen Savers which completely blows).
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
I loved The Site, I watched it almost every weekday for about two years. They canceled it after preempting it with the Princess Diana death broadcasts.
The Site was the perfect blend of high tech news and tech-related interest stories. I never cared much for ZDTV/TechTV/G4, they were actually "too geeky" in a bad sort of way.
Leo Laporte was the voice and actor (motion caption) for the tech gossip character "DevNull" (Laporte's old radio handle). He was also "Technical Managing Producer" of the hour-long show, so he did most of his work behind the scenes. The show was actually recorded in the same studio where all of the TechTV shows were, except they had just one huge room, a "working set" where segments were recorded all day while researchers, TV show webmasters, and others were hard at work in the background. These people were often featured in their own segments. It was very cool to hear from the show's own tech people (the show's site was originally hosted on a SPARCstation 20 running Apache and connected to a single T1). I loved the little details like that. And yet they really didn't dwell on the really technical aspects.
Soledad O'Brian was a great host, I think that job fit her better than the current news gigs she does these days. There was also a really good band of reporters for the show, Craig Miller was awesome, I wonder what he's up to these days? Lots of people from the old science show days from KRON/Discovery Channel.
Cliff Stoll ended each weekday show with about 5 minutes of insight, rants, and stories from his home in Berkeley.
TheSite was a nice grounded "magazine" look into the dotcom world. They interviewed a lot of visionaries and up-and-coming people in the industry. Lots of cool viewpoints and persepctives. Too bad their budget didn't allow for travel beyond the SF Bay / Silicon Valley area.
I really miss TheSite, but there won't even be anything like it. Even in it's best days, The Screen Savers was just a bunch of unwashed geeks hanging around Leo Laporte. Lots of geek details, flash, and no substance. *sigh*
Laporte's original TV gig, TheSite, was even better. See more here
TheSite was one of the first shows on MSNBC when it first came on the air. Unlike the other shows on the network, it was produced by ZDTV (long before they had their own channel). It was more classy, more professional, and yet seemed more interesting than anything on ZDTV/TechTV/G4.
Too bad it was canceled 2.5 years later, before most people had even heard of MSNBC, let alone the show itself.
I'm a big fan of Leo and watched the screensavers even before Patrick joined--when they had that girl (sure I know her name, but ugh, why mention it.) It was a really great/entertaining show that you could catch replays of during the day and not ruin your habitual, primetime TV schedule.
Sure, Leo didn't know everything and would sometimes say shit that wasn't right, but he had a TV personality. He was educated and talented in television entertainment. I miss him.
I have no idea what the tv executives were thinking after the two consecutive buy outs or whatever the hell you call them, but Leo showed up less and less with each one until he was no more. Though I never watched the show much in the past 5 years, I remember when it was good, and I did watch it with Patrick and Leo riding in the convertibles, and I do remember that I liked it.
To the now owners of G4TechTvCnetZDtvblah, I never change the channel to your network. You guys can go to hell and take shows like w1nn3r and 3l1te with you.
porp
Laporte and Ziff Davis started their TV venture in 1995 with "TheSite" on MSNBC. Awesome hour long daily show hosted by Soledad O'Brian and a bunch of over very talented folks. MSNBC canceled the show during a big programming change in 1997. I really miss that show.
In 1998 ZD started their own TV channel. The Screen Savers started out as a very crappy replacement for TheSite. I still enjoyed it, but you could tell that the company was now using the same resources to make about 5 hours of TV a day rather than 1 hour.
The Screen Savers was really starting to suck by the time ZDTV became TechTV.
Soon G4 got involved and totally ruined what little was left of the original ZD venture. Thankfully they finally changed the name of the show.
http://www.demonoid.com/torrents/download/HTTP/966 02/RevengeoftheBleep.www.Demonoid.com.torrent
Mmmm...Soledad. She was even better on "The Next Step" in the Discovery Channel's pre-suck days.
:)
Several of the reporters/hosts on TheSite came from The Next Step / The Know Zone and Beyond 2000.
Next Step, Know Zone, and later, The Answer Guys, were produced by KRON TV in San Francisco. Beyond 2000 was also shown on Discovery channel via KRON, but it was mostly produced in Australia. Next Step actually lived on for a few years after it was taken off Discovery, but you had to live in the SF Bay / Silicon Valley area to watch it. I think all of those shows are gone now. KRON isn't what it used to be. Last I saw, Henry Tannenbaum was hosting some gardening show...
Patrick, also a print journalist, had a bit of geek in him, but was bitter enough about technology to question things rather than drool over the latest new gadget.
Jessica, of course, eye candy with a brain... what else could you ask for???
Kevin Rose was always better doing his little bit pieces than he ever was a host.
Sarah just annoys me (and I hear from a friend of mine who was a set painter for the LA version of TSS that when they first got down here, little Sarah was stomping around bitching about how their set wasn't nearly as cool looking as Martin Sargent's--of course look where he is now.)
G4 is now using that lovely Hollywood idea of creating programming by looking at the marketing numbers... "Well, my Excel sheet says that if we change TSS to 'Attack of the Show' blah, blah, blah." Merely the fact that they have wardrobe people should tell you something. Do you think Patrick Norton could've gotten away with wearing his utility kilt on G4?
Yep... Everything that made TechTV semi-interesting to watch has gone away. Why did G4 even bother to buy TechTV?? Oh, yeah, that's right, TechTV actually had dial space on many cable and satellite systems. G4 didn't because who would actually want to watch a network who's programming was pretty much exclusively gaming?
Here's an example of the brilliant G4 programming: "Cinematech"
From G4's website
Yep... nothing like watching the screen of someone playing a video game for a half hour. Why, it's so in depth it gives me chills. The creator of that program must be cut from the cloth of the finest tapestry.
Anyway... listen to the Podcast. It's interesting to hear Kevin Rose and Robert Heron talk about the TV by marketing numbers that G4 is using. Hopefully the podcast will continue on and eventually become a video cast of some sort.
BTW, here's the direct link to the podcast if you're using some sort of podcast receiving software:
http://leoville.tv/podcasts/tlr
--J
Web hosting that doesn't suck!Dreamhost
I too miss Kate. Before she made it big on the tube we used to temp together at BigCo(tm). Good times, good times. Looks like she's plying her trade in NYC now...
G4 did have it, they decided to 'tweak' it until it became the unwatchable incarnation that is now called "Attack of the Show"
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
I'll have to listen, I stopped my tivo for season for TSS.
Who wants to watch 20 somethings that know nothing about tech other than "Wow that Sony PSP is cool...."
Umm. I'm the 30 something that buys all the neat toys, the first ones to buy the new phones, pda's, and hardware. So, you insult us. Nice, we go off on the next place to get our tech news. Too bad Slashdot is about it. If slashdot could just a TV Show.
Cinematech is actually the one show I found to be interesting on G4, it's just game trailers for upcoming games. It's a nice thing to watch for a few minutes when you're eating or something. It's not like you watch some dudes play counterstrike for 30 minutes, that is another one of their shows, arena I believe.
When I first saw TechTV, I was very impressed. I especially like how one of the policies that Leo implemented on TSS was to go live and if the computer crashed, show it on TV, and using Windows, many times their OS would crash in the middle of demos. They felt it was important to let people know that this happens to everybody and not just neophytes, and that ideally it should be avoidable and that was their way of sending a message to the software developers that if their products weren't stable, at least TSS wouldn't cover it up.
One problem these days with product reviews is that the line between editorial and advertising is to narrow, you don't know who to trust. TSS and some of the other shows on the early TechTV were very good about calling attention to products that, well, sucked and didn't live up to their claims. This probably alienated potential advertisers but it generated hardcore loyalty among viewers like me who felt that many of the personalities on TechTV were honorable and trustworthy.
When the network started running all kinds of weird fluff/syndicated crap, things started to decline. More emphasis was put on gaming and less on technology, more on goofy gadgets and less on core applications and utilities. When G4 took over the network, it was nearly dead and I haven't watched since.
I agree with others that Leo has a good personality for television, but sometimes I felt he was a little too animated and "fatherly". In contrast, Patrick and Kevin and others were more peer-like in the manner in which they presented information and news. Leo had more of a slightly patronizing hyper-exagerated-enthusiasm that I felt was over the top and annoying at times. But I can't deny that he was very knowledgable and capable. I would love to see the old crew back together again.
It's cutscenes, FMV, trailers, and whatever else from old games, new games, upcoming games, etc. Mostly cutscenes and intros. Not many trailers.
That's not to say any of it is actually GOOD, because damn little of it IS good. It's just that it's not merely trailers for upcoming games. Nitpicking.
Yes, Arena is the show where you watch other people play games. Arena is a microcosm of what's wrong with G4: anyone who plays video games or computer games would most likely prefer to PLAY the games themselves rather than watch SOMEBODY ELSE play the games.
If they have time or the desire to sit there and watch other people play, either they're too broke to buy games (great advertising demo: the poor and broke!) or they lost the TV remote and can't change the channel, OR they're stuck in a hospital bed with broken limbs and can't change the channel.
I deliberately configured my office so I cannot see the TV when I am working at my computer. I used to leave Tech TV on just as background noise all day long. Can't do that with G4 because it's too boring. Instead I tend to leave the Science channel (whoo! Slightly better than G4 anyway), NWI (bye), or my DVD player screensaver running.
Sig for hire.
I'm listening to the podcast right now and I'm hearing product reviews about noise cancelling headphones, cell phone companies and talk about other tech products that I'm interested in. Straight up talk and no bull without regard to what the 'suits' say they can say about this product or that product. What could be better or more interesting than that? I'll listen to further broadcasts.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
What about Kat http://www.catschwartz.com/. She was good to spank off to. Especially after her nudes surfaced on the 'net.
At 23:30 into the 34:44 min podcast mp3, Kevin starts taking about a DVI lcd deal he scooped, and Leo weighs in asking if he'd seen it on digg.com. About 24:00, Leo makes the ""Random Taco" call concerning /. editors, while discussing the differences between /. and digg. Shhwweeet! I love this podcast.
of course look where he is now
Well, where is Martin Sargent now? Is Unscrewed cancelled? What is he doing? I thought he was cool, and I would be curious to know where I could see him. TIA.