Slashdot Mirror
G4 Moves Further From Technology Roots
Variety has a piece detailing some new hires at G4, all designed to further move the channel away from its technology roots. From the article: "One of Finn's priorities will be to scout people to profile when 'Icons' relaunches this summer. The 'Biography'-style skeinskein has been revamped to focus on figures that appeal to young men, including J.J. Abrams and Bryan SingerBryan Singer. She'll also continue to strengthen the lineup of guests visiting G4's live, studio-based series. In addition, both 'Filter' and 'Attack of the Show' will be relaunched in June with a scaled-back focus on technology. Heavier emphasis will be on attitude, humor and a broader range of male-oriented topics."
Is there any reason to watch this channel anymore...?
I thought AotS was a perfect balance, and it is the only show I watch on G4 regularly. If it turns into Maxim magazine on TV then I will be very disapointed. I catch Icons occiationly, but that's it. Are they trying to be like SpikeTV? I don't watch that channel either.
Well, that sucks. The whole reason I liked watching G4 was the Tech stuff. When they added Star Trek, I didn't mind. I like Star Trek, and if you stretch your logic it is kind of about technology as well. But the Man Show, Street Furry, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, none of those are really about tech. I guess you could make an argument about Street Furry being about Car technology, but I digress.
There are in fact women who watch G4, and they are totally leaving us out. We don't want to watch the Man Show (for obvious reasons), I want to watch shows that focus on Technology and Gaming. I want to have guests that all Geeks can enjoy, male or female, young or old. I want Icons to tell me about Tech/Geek icons, not male icons.
Wasn't Spike TV supposed to be the Chanel for men?
"Just call me Girly Blank"
Is this one of those Little Caesar's commercials?
Pizza Pizza!
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).
stupid stupid stupid stupid.
i could live a little longer in this prison
Targeted programming pretty much always sucks.
Good shows might appeal more to one demographic than another, but a good show is a good show.
For example, you can make a show like "Gilmour Girls" and 30-something women will like it more than most other folks, resulting in a "cult hit" within that demographic, and TV people love it when that happens, because it makes selling ad time easier... but if you get a bunch of executives to say "we need to find a show that hits the Gilmour Girls market", that show will almost certainly be a complete train wreck, because they are not setting out to make a good show that will happen to click with certain people, but setting out to click with those people and the need for it to be good is a distant second.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Yeah, I've noticed program changes with Adult Swim. Someone tell me why they are showing "Saved by the Bell" on Adult Swim?
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
Isn't it Bryan Singer that young men appeal to, and not the other way around? :)
Just hours after announcing their latest change, the G4 management have decided to update the channel again.
"Even with the recent changes," Finn said, "we still don't think we're still not reaching our target audience. We've decided that every program will be replaced with a guy sitting in shorts and a wifebeater, drinking a low-quality beer. The guy will occasionally scratch himself, and of course the wifebeater will be covered in the requisite motor oil and pit stains. We feel this'll really gel with the 'masculine audience' we're striving for."
Audiences will have to wait for the fall season for "Guy in a Wifebeater", but focus groups are already responding by vomiting.
You mean to tell me that the shiny video-game box can be used for non-interactive media?
How strange.
Wait a second... G4 was about technology? Dude, I had no idea!
Next thing you know, people will be saying that MTV was originally designed for music videos... *shudders* The world is all crazy, Mommy...
You are still innocent until proven guilty. What's changed is what they do to innocent people. - notnAP, #26891325
I thought the G4/G5 CPUs being replaced by Intel CPUs. Some technology just don't know how to die gracefully.
I didn't know Bryan Singer's middle name was SingerBryan.
So, it's SpikeTV Lite? When do they premiere Striperella and MXE?
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
I have no idea who J.J. Abrams and Bryan Singer are. Icons was one of the only programs on TechTV I liked. While it suffered from some of the hero-worship shortcomings of most documentary subjects, it was decent-enough edutainment about people that otherwise would be ignored by edutainment channels because they didn't cause any military conflicts that the U.S. has been engaged in, and weren't subjects of murder trials.
:(
Ok, I've looked up J.J. Abrams on Wikipedia and he sounds like his life should be pretty-well covered by Entertainment Tonight or whatever the show that stalks celebrities in the television industry is called. G4 seems to not have a clear idea of what male they're targetting with their TechTV acquisition. I can tell you what a possibly...intolerant group of people that correlate with certain...masculine...interests are going to think of J.J. Abrams are going to think when they see he attended SLC. Well, assuming they know anything about SLC.
Anyway, killing off Icons basically removes the last program I even watch on G4. I tried watching Brainiacs, but it was really just a more scientifically-challenged version of Myth Busters. I've seen every episode of Star Trek TNG at least three times and have no desire to ever watch the show again. AotS, like The Screensavers, is like the Internet on Television. I might as well sit for a few hours waiting for news aggregators to update.
Why doesn't anyone make television for me, I'm not that much of an oddball.
In the near future, G4 will acquire Spike TV. The new channel will be known as G4 Spike TV. Within 1-2 years, the station will be rebranded G4. Six months after that we will see an increase in programming of such things as "The Martha Steward Show"...
Insert Sig Here
I have my G5 power mac. I could careless about the status of G4.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
'Attack of the Show' will be relaunched in June with a scaled-back focus on technology.
I don't see how they can do that; there's hardly any technology focus left on the show.
The only thing I still watch is X-Play. They've apparently dropped Anime Unleashed. Even the shows I used to watch on G4 before the takeover are either gone (Portal, Eye Drops) or I just stopped caring (Cinematech).
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
An old penny-arcade comic commented on how games are now marketted at the cool kids. Not the geeks anymore.
I recently played the new Tomb Raider and I noticed something. In the first game she was a geekie kinda girl. Sure physically fit and rich but you could tell she would rather read a good book then go clubbing. A dork with tits.
But over the years she been getting further and further away from that to the point where she now seems to have some "cool" dudes hanging out with her and having totally changed her way of talking.
It seems to me very clear that this game is being marketted at a different audience. This is a game for cool kids who look, or at least think they look, like the characters in the game. Geeks need not apply.
The reason is offcourse obvious, marketshare. If you got the geek market then obviously you want to expand that to the non-geek market and so you add some stuff, remove some stuff and then wonder what the fuck happened because nobody is watching anymore.
I like to call the effect, BBC program being raped by the yanks. BBC is geekie. They got ugly losers losing in the game that is life. Wether that is red dwarf or scapheap challenge it is about fat sad people being normal.
Give that to an american producer and he will attempt to cool it up. Search for Red Dwarf american pilot for a real horror show. The american version of scrapheap challenge removes the team factor (instead having the nightmare of all geeks, the being picked by the team leader leading to the horror of being the last one picked, remember that from school?), adds meaningless radiochatter and camera movements and in general looks like a show that feels american. Ugh.
Sadly it sells. Face it, we as geeks are not a big enough group. Even if a product is successfull at targetting us it is only a matter of time until some person looking for promotion suggest altering it to appeal to a larger audience.
Old tv shows don't die, they just get reworked to appeal to more and more people until finally nobody watches anymore.
MTV has become a joke for being the music station that no longer airs music. It was so much a joke that other stations sprang up to replace it. Now they too are starting with more and more non-music. Why? Because we got this insane law that forbids us from shooting people from marketting.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Any station that would let patric norton loose with a sledge hammer and a pc or better yet a bench transformer cranked all the way up and some electrical components. now that was good tv. leo was cool too megan and kat were nice. put on more girl geek shows.
I mean sex and tech what else could a guy ask for.
oh ya and beer!
I can still remember back in the day when this channel was ZDTV... I was all excited when my satellite provider added a new computer channel that I stumbled on one day. I remember watching Dvorak argue with people, seeing hardware reviews, news programs... it was cool to be a nerd.
Then ZDTV turned into TechTV and it was still good. I loved The Screen Savers with Leo and Patrick (and Kate before that), Call for Help, plus the news and hardware reviews (Fresh Gear)... even the X Play show was cool back then (it was Extended Play and didn't include Morgan Webb). There was even anime and stuff, but it still felt in line with the tech/nerd culture.
Even TechTV started to go downhill though... with shows like Unscrewed with Martin Sergeant (poser), Wired for Sex, and the hundred reruns of Robot Wars. But it completely fell apart when G4 bought it, and I've only watched about three shows on it since the buyout (all of them were Icons).
Now I'm just waiting for someone else to make a real tech channel the caliber of the old ZDTV/TechTV. It's not like they have any competition...
Not the pro wrestling version of Starcade (although I wouldn't put it past G4 to do that these days).
I'm talking about the classic video game "game show" from the early 80's with Geoff Edwards.
Technology and gaming shows don't pull in enough viewers to support a network? Holy crap!
This is great news!great news and I can'''t wait for it.
for it.
for it.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
I miss "The Screensavers"... I got so much out of that show.
A few years ago when I first came across G4 it was really fun. It was all about games and all the shows had a real "we love games" kind of attitude. There was also some pretty good unintentional comedy (Starcade, although I would occasionally find myself getting into the competition on that show). But then when they bought tech tv they ruined both channels. Now there's almost nothing about games and evn when they do talk about them they almost exclusively talk shit. If I love games why would I want to watch a couple of smarmy assholes talk shit about them? Even when they give a game a good review they still make stupid little sarcastic jokes. Oh and Morgan Webb is not sexy, if you think she's hot you need to go outside and look around.
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
AOTS, ICONS, and Xplay are the only shows worth a damn left on that network. And then only when focused on Tech.
The only thing I can think of is that their ratings are higher for Street Fury (Occassionally I will stop here until the host speaks) and that other crap fox show and the man show then the tech used to bring in. They think this will translate into daytime viewers. Idiots.
Don't ditch the Tech shows. Improve the tech shows. How about some hosts who have actually read through their material before they read it off the telepromter. How about leaving ICONS the hell alone, I enjoy that show consistently because they are ICONS to me and its like a tech history lesson for my wife in only a half hour. How about some actual budgets. How about NeverMind I'll just watch the podcasts of your old techTV employees.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Complain all your want folks, the facts remain, as a Tech channel it just didn't rake in enough dollars. G4 as a game channel didn't rake in enough dollars. So they tried a merger. That didn't rake in enough dollars.
This process will go on until they either hit on a formula that works (like MTV did) or die off. Face the facts, it's a business, not a charity.
ZDTV was and always will be the penacle of geek television programming. Cool people, good shows, interesting topics. They just needed time to develop more content and broaden their appeal. I remember calling into The Screensavers, being on live TV, and actually interacting with people who knew what the hell they were talking about. Plus Kate Botello is the sexiest geek alive right behind Amanda Tapping.
I hope this channel gets wiped off the map. Back when it was Tech TV, I use to watch almost every show (Screen Savers, Call for Help, etc..), and when they merged with G4, there were some interesting additions (including Icons which is the best damn show on that network). Now it's Star Trek, Man Show, and Attack of the Show which caters to brain dead college kids, and X-play which is a basically 99% repeats, and God-awful comedy skits that take up 3/4 of the show. Rot in Hell G4
Apparently because they knew G4 wasn't as good, and wanted to kill off the competition. It's too bad they couldn't have just made their network better.
The vast majority of Junkyard Wars was much closer to the show than what you are describing. What you are describing is what happened right before the show went off the air. I think the situation was trying anything and everything to get their viewers. It also hurts your argument that they aired both series before the whole Americanized crap.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Come on people, there's got to be somebody out there that can make that happen - take the best of what G4 cast off, and create a true technology channel.
Do the kinds of programs Discover and History don't - Popular Science and Popular Mechanics (especially those "top secret" specials). Concentrate on computers and video games... Leave the sports video game coverage for G4 - they turn every E3 into a giant commercial for EA sports, anyways.
Profile the geeky side of celebrities, whether it's some actor spending endless hours on WoW or a jock who sits up late into the night playing Star Wars Galaxies.
We also need news - not like anything anywhere else, but the happenings on your latest MMORPG or the most recent shuffling of developer houses among publishers. News about betas and bugs, virii and easter eggs. Sure other stations may get around to having a special on the quest for the X-Prize, but we want to know the juicy details AS THEY UNFOLD.
TechTV probably got three times the viewers G4 did, but TV execs are morons. It's an old boys network, and they just don't get the target demographic. Others have mentioned the ruination of Adult Swim, and more obviosuly, the parallel with MTV's descent into vidiocy. We've seen the unfailing ABILITY of these jackasses to turn a good thing into crap, and their complete INABILITY to see the terrible result for what it is.
I never tune into G4 anymore. Even X-Play is unbearable, and everything else is Spike TV rejects. Ugh. It needs to just go off and die.
G4 is dead. The time for SlashDot TV has finally come!!!
Hmmm... I think G4 has a problem, and here it is:
- They wanted to target gamers. Being marketers, they can only think of anything in traditional demographic terms. Gamers are mostly young men. So, they created a network for young men, about games.
- The problem is, young men already watch other networks, and by focusing only on young men they alienated everyone else who played videogames. They soon found that videogamers, on the whole, would rather be playing videogames or watching TV than watching TV about videogames.
- The doom spiral began. They quickly began unloading everything on G4 that had anything to do with videogames, instead aggressively targeting the young male demographic that is already watching Spike TV.
- Spike TV begins airing videogame shows. Game, set, and match.
I am absolutely convinced that if I were president of G4, I could turn things around in a heartbeat. As it happens, I imagine that ownership of the company will be pretty easy to come by once it ends up in the cable channel scrap heap. G4, we hardly knew ye.
Hey, here's an idea: why don't we all just stop caring? You want tech content? Go online! There's a ton of stuff out there already between podcasts and videocasts. Hell, between Revision3 and the Leo Laporte Multimedia Empire, I probably get a good 3 to 4 hours of entertainment a week. Add into that your Command N's, your Digital Life, your RocketBoom. And that's just scratching the surface.
:)
Its funny to me to hear everyone bitch and moan about how G4 and Comcast screwed up TechTV. Who cares?! Stop complaining and just watch the NEW TechTV, all online, with the same people and personalities that you are used to. Besides, the stuff that Kevin and Alex do on DiggNation is far funnier and interesting than TSS ever was, since it had to be dumbed down and sanitized for television.
On top of all that, the content on these 'casts is fresher and more up to date than the TV show's were, just thanks to the production time. TSS and the nightly tech news show were pretty good at keeping up to date, but some of the other content was atrociously out of date.
And in a matter of a year or two, maybe we'll even be able to get it to our big screen's without going through hoops. (Or I should say, the AVERAGE person will be able to watch it on their TV without having to muck around much.) Then speciality channels like G4 will die horrible, unprofitable deaths in obscurity.
And then we can dance on their graves.
I sig, therefore I am.
I received TechTV up until right before the whole G4 shakeup, and by the continually worsening news it sounds like I'm not missing much.
Seeing Extended Play turn into the crappy X-play was bad enough. Adam Sessler used to be genuinely funny, and they used to put out a decent amount of reviews...then somebody decided the show needed breasts, and it all went downhill from there.
(On that note, I fail to see why anyone finds Morgan Webb attractive. She looks so decisively average it hurts, add in her ridiculous bias against 2d gaming...and the conclusion is that the only way I'd hit it is in the head with a lead pipe.)
Honestly, I have watched a lot more G4 since they started running Star Trek TNG re-runs, and now TOS re-runs (I watch the Saturday uncut episodes, not the 11pm Star Trek 2.0 with the annoying chat bar and stupid "stock" ticker). However, that is going to get old as soon as I have seen all the re-runs once, and then they start repeating.
Rundown of the fall of G4 1: G4 started out as a great network that was nerdy and informational and fun. 2: G4TV (at the time) had a slogan of "G4TV, TV for Gamers" 3: After the merge, G4TechTV had funny, geeky shows like Portal, informational shows like The Screen Savers, and Cinematic shows like Cinematech 4: Comcast took it and beat the crap out of it, pulled a hat over it's eyes, and kept it from seeing what GAMERS want. 5: With the hat over it's eyes, Comcast reached over and drove the network in the wrong lane, and drove it off onto the "total absolute crap" highway. 6: TechTV has been totally absorbed and assimilated, completely disappearing. 7: Comcast moves G4 almost totally away from gaming, adds some rap and gangsta stuff.
Do what most of the TV herd is doing and begin sliding your focus (aka programming) over to your website. If you REALLY want that 18-24 demo, go where their eyeballs are - not where you hope they'll be... Sheesh!
We need to have a Slashdot TV, that goes back to what ZDTV originally started, a Microsoft bashing, tech oriented channel. Bring back shows such as Invent This, Silicon Spin and TechLive. Break apart your call in shows, that is, Call 4 Help be mostly for newbies, and have ScreenSavers be more tech savy questions. Do not confuse the two. Cut the crap interviews with the directors of Stick It and stuff like that. And, most importantly, while video games are a part of technology, lets not confuse the issue and try to say that video games are all there is to technology like G4TechTV did.