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What Actually Happened to TechTV?
thelancer asks: "Early last year, Australian cable got TechTV. But not for long. It turned out the fix was already in, and TechTV left Australian screens at the end of 2006 when G4 pulled the plug on international distribution. As someone who only got a taste, but desperately wanted more (of what I saw in the first two months, not nearer the end), I've done the rounds and read some stories on the buy out, but nothing has given me the who, when, and the all important why? And they all assume you know the history. Can the Slashdot crowd put together a more complete picture on what really happened at TechTV?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TechTV
Business happens. You've never seen two businesses team up in order to lose money before? I guess you don't have AOL down under either...
2006? I knew with timezones and international datelines and stuff.. plus the whole toilet spinning backwards thing.. But it's already the end of 2006?
I started watching ZDTV back in 1998 when it started and watched all the time. I even got on Call for Help once and was a really good time. I was saddened when they merged with G4 and in my opinion ruined the shows. But nothing good or bad lasts forever I supose.
- TechTV spends years making quality television and building up relationships with a variety of cable providers who choose to carry TechTV.
- Comcast starts a tv station called G4 that nobody watches.
- Because nobody likes or watches G4, no cable providers will carry G4, except Comcast.
- Comcast, unable to convince their competitors to carry their crappy G4 channel, buys TechTV, kills it, and starts broadcasting G4 in its place.
- G4 now shows on a variety of cable providers.
- Profit.
Is this true? I dunno, it's the way I heard it. If you want facts, then go read wikipedia or something, don't Ask Slashdot.I'm Australian.
Telstra and Optus have rolled out cable in limited metro regions. I don't think there will be any/many more rollouts of cable technology. The push will be with fiber, with FTTH or FTTN. The Tasmanian government had an excellent oportunity to roll out FTTH, however, with all their wisdom they decided that rolling out natural gas to every home in Tasmania would be more than enough in one go and that when people wanted FTTH they would simply dig the streets up again and have another rollout... the biggest oversight in Tasmanian history???
My cable connection is with a few coper wires connected to my phone exchange... I guess it's not cable in the american sense of the owrd, or in the optus/telstra cable sense of the word, but its good enough for me!
BitTorrent is the new distribution medium. The only people who use older services are those who have way to much money or those who lack the technical ability to operate a computer.
Does it go on forever?
G4 bought out TechTV and shoved out nearly all the non-gaming technology related programming, in its place putting more Cinamatech and X-Play timeslots, replacing Screensavers with Attack of the Show, and adding the show Cheat!.
Then, when they realized video game players weren't watching because they were playing video games, they began to kill of all their video game shows one by one by replacing them with Star Trek and The Man Show. It's just another useless channel like the rest of them now.
If you miss TechTV, check out hak5.org..I know these guys personally and they are awesome (they live 45 minutes from me). Leo Laporte has even guest hosted an episode of their show.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Here is my perspective. I've been watching that channel here in the US for years. I watched it as ZDTV for about a year or two. Here is what I can tell you about the history of the channel.
When it was ZDTV, it was very different. It was all computers (Ziff Davis, after all). They had some of the shows that existed up until recently (The Screen Savers being the prime example). But they also had other programming. I remember a show that showed nothing but computer generated animation that people could send in. A user content show, it was ahead of it's time. It also showed some very neat stuff (as companies would send in neat stuff too to show what they could do). This was how I first found Animusic.
Later, the network changed it's name to TechTV. Not much really changed that I remember. This is the time frame that I remember shows like Fresh Gear (which may have been there before) which was a great gadget review show (TVs, DVD Players, Digital Cameras, random gadgets, etc). I can't remember if X-Play was part of ZDTV or not, but I know it was there during TechTV.
Now it is somewhere in this timeframe that I found out about G4 and I really wanted that channel. An all video game channel, that would be cool. But I had DirecTV (which is where I watched ZDTV/TechTV) and Comcast (which didn't carry G4). I later got to see the channel just a little bit on someone's digital cable and it still looked neat (all I got to see was Cinematech, which was cool).
Now during the TechTV days things changed. I remember Call For Help dumped Leo later during this time (I think CFH was a ZDTV show). The Screen Savers was still their headliner program. Other shows later came on including Invent This! (showed inventors, their inventions, how they came up with it, etc... a fantastic show), Anime Unleashed (showed Anime, both good and bad), and a few other good shows. There were some slips during this time (like trying to turn daytime into a CNN of computer news).
Then G4 decided to buy them. I thought that would be good. I wanted to see G4. I was a little worried (I seem to remember things being better during the ZDTV days, but I can't tell you why). It took about 1 day (and I'm being generous) to figure out what an unmitigated disaster this was. I later found out why G4 bought TechTV.
G4 had no shows people would watch, and was terrible. TechTV was a nice little network and had loyal viewers. What better way to start building your empire than buying out a "rival" and destroying them.
So G4 quickly removed everything on TechTV except a handful of shows. The Screen Savers was still there (I think), although it quickly became Attack of the Show. X-Play stayed on (which is better than ANY show on G4), but they did change their set and now I get the feeling the network big-wigs are trying to infuse the show with more "anime-hip-hop-coolness". All the other great little shows were gone. Fresh Gear was killed. Invent This (which was about a year old, at most) was killed.
So what did we get? Cinematech (a decent of waste of a half-hour, sometimes). We also got Icons (interesting profiles some times, but took it's self way to serious), Cheat (unwatchable), Filter (half intersting, with the worlds most annoying hostess), and that's about it. That's all that came over, that I can think of. Oh, Arena (I don't want to watch other people play FPSes with an annoying commentary by a drill-seargent-wannabe).
Now G4 seems to be trying to become SpikeTV. Now I should note that SpikeTV was much better as whatever it was before, which was much better as TNN. But now G4 has ST:TNG (good), Trek 2.0 (good show, made unwatchable by shot-gunning as many tickers and flashing things on the screen as possible), Totally Outrageous Behavior (immature caught-on-tape), Fastlane (never seen it, no intention to), Brainiac (look! we do cool science stuff and act like immature idiots), Ed The Sock's Night Party ("One angry sock puppet and his blazing hot redhead co-host get down and dirty, and often wet" - Immature, e
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
It doesn't really matter what happened to the name 'techtv' because the best part of the station is still alive and well in webcast form. Check out http://www.dl.tv/ its pretty good for hearing about new gadgets coming out and getting the 'big news' of the day. Plus its free!
-Bill
I've been watching every episode for years. They've only given out a handfull of 1s, and I can kind of understand it. As bad as most games are, they are playable. It takes a special kind of game to get a 1.
That said, most games get 2/3s, with a few getting 4s, and just the creme-de-la-creme getting 5s. They don't over-rate like most places who hand out 4s and 5s for anything that isn't un-playable.
Of course, they never intended to give out a 0, but they did once. The game was a semi-truck racing game. There was no music or sound effects. The "race" was with another truck, which never left the starting line. The game looked terrible, and had practically no clipping or collision detection. It was the kind of thing you couldn't believe anyone would try to sell. I mean people try to sell things that just aren't fun or are terribly annoying, but this wasn't even a game yet. It was a tech demo for a tech demo for a preview for a game.
X-Play isn't perfect, but they are pretty good. They are the only show left on the network that is good (except ST:TNG which they haven't managed to ruin yet).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Not exactly, but if you want what TechTV was go here and then poke around. You'll end up finding Revision3 and DL.TV. Don't bother about what happened. Just enjoy what has resulted. TechTV controlled by the people on the air for the people who liked to watch it.
The story of TechTV began with the MSNBC show, The Site which starred Soledad O'Brien and a computer generated character, Dev Null, who was voiced and controlled by Leo Laporte. I never saw the Site, but TVNewser has a good overview of the show.
After the Site was cancelled, came ZDTV which was owned by Ziff Davis. When Ziff Davis sold the channel to Paul Allen, they changed the name to TechTV.
During that time G4 was started. Owned by Comcast, they bought TechTV and merged the channels calling it G4TechTV, closing down TechTV's San Francisco studio and cancelling Call For Help. From the start there were signs that buying TechTV was simply a way for Comcast to get G4 into more houses by canibalizing the audience of TechTV. They did not offer ScreenSavers host Patrick Norton a contract and while they initially were going to have Leo Laporte appear in pretaped segments, they never actually did that. They also cancelled Fresh Gear and all of TechTV's other shows except for the ScreenSavers and X-Play. Then several months later, G4 dropped the "TechTV" and any pretense that they were going to continue having any technology focus.
After a few months, the Canadian version of G4 offered to hire Laport and begin to tape new episodes of Call For Help, informally called Call For Help 2.0. In August of 2005 the US G4 began to air Call For Help 2.0, but early in the morning with little to no advertising. After several months it was taken off the air. It is still airing in Canada and on the How To channel in Australia. Recently, it has been made available for purchase from Google Video in the USA and is easilly found on torrent trackers.
Now G4 has begun airing Star Trek:TNG and the original Star Trek, as well as the Man Show and Fastlane and increasingly decreasing videogame coverage. Many people have begun to call G4 a SpikeTV clone.
In brighter news, many TechTV alumni have gone on to particiapte in online podcasts and vid casts such as This Week In Tech, dl.tv, Cranky Geeks, Hook Me Up and The Chris Pirillo Show which, when combined, probably produce more original weekly content than TechTV ever did.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Come on- how could you ruin Trek? I mean I guess you can take up 1/2 the screen with some sort of stock ticker, and a really annoying chat room at the bottom. Maybe some odd factoids scrolling across the top of the small remaining usable space. But they couldn't possibly be that stupid.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Cable has a limited number of channels that it can have on at any one time. TechTV was already well established in many markets. By merging G4 and TechTV, they ended up placing G4 on a whole lot of cable networks that wouldn't have otherwise bought G4 from their competitor (Comcast), especially based on the quality of the programming.
They then cancel the TechTV programming, which got their costs back down to the original rate of expenditure, and for the cost of buying TechTV, they got their channel in all of the TechTV markets. And I'm guessing, that the cable operators have to pay them for the right to show their stuff, so they slowly make back their money from the purchase.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
The name of the game was Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. It is the stuff of legend. If you find it, You're Not Winner.
The ______ Agenda
On Poxtel some of the shows moved to the DIY channel. But the reality is that TechTV actually had very little original content. It was the same shows repeated over and over and over (even more than usual for Poxtel - apparently, according to NickJr it increases our [/kids] retention of information).
... well ... not bad at all.
The primary content that moved to DIY was utter crap. I don't think X-play was moved across (I cancelled my Poxtel a while ago). Pity because Adam was a pisser and Morgan was
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
I watched TechTV for a few weeks back in 2001 when it was still on and I found it boring and irrelevant. Most of the tech stuff they had on there was already old by the time they broadcast it, due to the fact that I had already read it on the Internet and began to forget about it by the time they could show it.
I kind of felt the same sentiment towards that channel that I do towards hard-copy tech magazines (I found them very enjoyable in the early 90's prior to the web boom, but obviously, due to the web, they have pretty much dropped down to zero-relevance). News and information (the focus of TechTV) has much more value, the more "hot off the press" it is. Only the Internet can provide the most "hot off the press" news in a practicle, relatively low-cost manner.
Amazingly, 'Trek 2.0' still manages to look WORSE than you make it sound.
"Cable has a limited number of channels that it can have on at any one time."
Come on. Have you seen some of the crap in the midst of those 600 channels ? Quite a number of them are just filling a space on the dial with infomercials -- the SAME infomercials as the next channel and the one four more clicks over.
There was and is plenty of space in the bandwidth for TechTV and G4. They also didn't kill it in order to steal the audience for G4, as some people have said -- why would a network exec steal an audience from a channel HE OWNED (TechTV) for another channel HE OWNED ? Especially when he knows not all the audience will follow from one to another ? At most, he would kill smaller auidience show for it's production costs, which would explain killing G4, not TechTV. Even killing G4 to get that audience into TechTV, while not being smart, would be less stupid.
No, there is no other way to explain this, except stupidity. No matter how hard you try, you cannot invent a plausible reason why a self-interested person would have killed TechTV. These are the people who are in charge of multi-billion dollar corporations -- complete morons.
1) Start company
2) Buy out a competition company
3) ???
4) Profit.
a few weeks later i heard about the potential buy-out; i knew nothing about comcast (in eastern nd/western mn) and didn't care... until the day it was announced that the buy-out had taken place.
g4tv is a perfect example of why this country is tearing itself apart. everything is directed at children in the sub-30 age group. i'm only 23, but i can safely call these people children because it's a mental age condition that i'm referring to: the kids who sit around playing video games until they have to go to work at mcdonalds; the kids who spout obscenities all over because it must be cool; the children who listen to rap because they can't think for themselves and buy whatever they're told is cool; the children who think that video game design is cake and think they can do it too... even though they failed out of english in grade 3-9 (take your pick), opted for business math instead of algebra and took some sort of food or eco science course instead of chemistry because it's too hard; the babies that were left in daycares and in front of the television to grow up because their parents were too busy to take any notice, even when they started smoking at age 12.
this channel serves to do nothing (aside from x-play... most of the time) but show the whiny generation (what is it, gen z now?) that it's ok to avoid responsibility and get stoned in your parents' basement (luckily, that show about weed was very short-lived) because being smart is overrated.
aldous huxley made greater predictions in 'brave new world' than nostradamous ever could, this world is shaping into huxley's brave new world more and more.
My cable connection is with a few coper wires connected to my phone exchange... I guess it's not cable in the american sense of the owrd, or in the optus/telstra cable sense of the word, but its good enough for me!
I am American.
Traditionally and historically, cable has been a coaxial cable run along the streets, usually fairly close to where the telephone lines are, operated, in most cases, by a different provider than the telco. The cable carries an RF spectrum of TV channels, some occupying positions on the spectrum that are not available to broadcast because they are in use by other services. That's what we mean when we talk about analogue cable.
This is in a mutating state right now, though. Some of the spectrum has been sliced off, first for high-speed internet service, then for digital television, then for telephone service.
The high-speed internet requires a modem that has a coaxial connector on one side and an ethernet jack on the other.
The digital cable service requires a set-top box that connects to the coax and puts out a signal on a designated analogue TV channel (usually channel 3 or 4) and/or on a set of baseband connections and/or DVI or HDMI. Incidentally, traditional analogue cable also used converters like this in cases where you have a (very) old TV that doesn't have the cable channels or are subscribed to some premium channels, which would be scrambled, and need the converter to descramble them.
The digital phone service requires a "terminal" which has a coax connection on one side and a POTS socket on the other. You have to provide power to it, though, and if you lose power, you lose phone service too. These are usually implemented as VOIP.
You can also decouple the services. I get my television by satellite (better picture, better selection), my internet by cable (faster than DSL, FTTH not available in my area), and my telephone by traditional copper pair (it just works).
I might point out, though that there is additional competition coming in. In areas where FTTH is being offered (by the telco), they are offering the same trifecta as the cable company. The satellite provider offers internet, but it is very high-lag and very high-cost. It is therefore mostly of interest for rural areas
www.wavefront-av.com
Like most of you, I never did have G4 (until now). When I first got satellite television, I found TechTV (around 1999, so right after their name change).
The Screen Savers, by far, was the [u]best TV show on air[/u]. Call for Help, as well, was very nice, along with Extended Play.
Later, I eventually saw the ads and small blocks demonstrating G4TechTV (an intermittent name). They had The Screen Savers, still, but also added shows such as Cinematech (which can be good, sometimes), Arena (sometimes good, usually bad, though), and Brainiac (pretty funny and it's educational!). I thought it was going to be neat to have a few more game-oriented shows.
What I didn't realize, though, was that G4 eventually took over TechTV entirely - I was thinking "what happened to the name 'G4TechTV', and why is it now just 'G4'?"
Now, they completely ruined The Screen Savers before killing it (providing us with teen-oriented script kiddie hosts) and redubbing it The Attack of the Show (seems like their naming committee spent all of their funds on hookers and booze, like the Microsoft game console naming committee).
To be brutally honest, G4 is the worst thing to ever hit the airwaves regarding nerds/geeks - it makes us look bad. Not all of us are porn-obsessed, Star Trek-watching, constant gamers that never leave their mother's basement in fear of not having G4.
For them to have a half-decent network, I would recommend reworking the entire channel - bring back all of the TechTV shows, perhaps rip out the so-so or bad ones, and adding in the only good G4 TV shows.
I miss my TechTV. I miss my nightly The Screen Savers block.
They left Tv and moved to the web. All for the better.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
The Learning Channel used to show educational programming like The Discovery Channel, but then it slowly began to falter and began showing arts and crafts channels.
Ironically, when TLC was launched, it was because the Discovery Channel itself was moving away from educational programming. Basically it was becoming the "war channel", with nothing but military tech shows and eventually even military history. Rather than spinning off the popular military stuff into its own channel, they apparently decided it made more sense to keep corrupting the existing channel (which already had a spot in most cable lineups) and push all that "boring old education stuff" into a new channel.
Eventually of course they did spin off the War/Wings/Military/[insert name of week here] Channel, and in a rare turnaround Discovery actually went back to something like its intended format. Of course by then TLC was already drifting...
For the best msg. of why it died, see this note:
r eshold=2&commentsort=3&mode=thread&cid=15828882
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=192849&th
In the meantime, Ziff Davis has been trying to bring back the TechTV flavor on a minute budget with DigtalLife TV
http://dl.tv/blogs/digitallifetv/default.aspx
for tech fans by tech fans.
Truth in advertising, I'm a Ziff editor, but I've got nothing to do with this project, except I think it's cool and it's as close to TechTV as you'll find these days over the air or online.
Steven
I almost agree, but Alton Brown now has three shows on the Food Network, (if you count Iron Chef America)... Say what you want about Emeril, but Paula, Alton, Giada, and a few others help fuel my cooking hobby the same way TechTV (bless it's dead and rotting soul) once appeased the geek in me.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
I agree with the X-Play sentiment, but it should be noted (in case someone has a weird cable system that carries G4 but not Spike and tries to find it) that Spike has ST:TNG (and DS9) while G4 carries the awful and ruined "Star Trek 2.0" where they put a whole bunch of scrolling junk on the screen to frame classic Star Trek episodes.
Ah, the dreaded reply to myself: I had no idea that they were putting ST:TNG on 2 channels. My bad.
A: It became TV for losers. I realized this when I was channel surfing one day and stopped to watch a show called "12 Guys It's Okay to Hate" (or something similar) on G4TV. I don't know why I watched it other than a morbid sense of curiosity. I can honestly say that anybody who hates the people on the list is a genuine loser. Most of the people on their list were only there because they were successful (mostly celebrities). So much for geeky and offbeat TV programming; the geekiest shows on TV these days are probably Mythbusters and Good Eats.
Nathan's blog
What does LWATCDR stand for?
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
It was already going downhill by then, but when they decided to put that horrible disgrace of a show on TV, I stopped watching the channel forever.
The way they dehumanize women on that show all in favor of the almighty 'middle aged man' class (and I'm 35, mind you, I believe that puts me close to ground zero), makes my stomach turn. And I've tried to just appreciate the humor, too... at least until it dawns on me after 5 minutes that there is no humor just shock jock b.s. most likely from people who wish they could get laid.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Morgan Webb IS HOT!!!1
Linux, because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.