Slashdot Mirror
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.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.
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
I'll add a little perspective on the actual buyout. In 2003, Paul Allen decided he no longer wanted to play with TechTV and decided to sell it. At that time the network was in the red and was starting to stagnate in the number of homes it was in at around 40 million. They needed to improve programming and get into mor ehomes, but as an independent channel they couldn't get into more homes without leverage. So Paul wanted to get some money back and the execs wanted a partner that could help get them into more homes. To improve the programming they hired Greg Brannan, former Programming Director at E! Entertinment Television.
It took a year (and some) to finally find buyers. In that time, the programming began to get better ratings. The INternational arm of the channel was profitable. The Web arm of the company was breaking even and the TV arm of the company looked to get into the black within a year if all went well.
However, the sale privce of the company was still based on the prospectus issued by Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures over a year ago. Fox, Universal, EchoStar, Sony and Comcast all expressed interest. At one point it was rumoured that Sony was a go and would buy the channel in order to take advantage of the control room's ability to launch other channels. However the deal did not get done and Comcast eventually won out. They got the network at a very afordable price.
Comcast handed the property to G4 for evaluation and eventual merger. G4's CEO brought a team of G4 execs to San Francisco to meet and discuss integration. Greg Brannan proposed several schedules that involved taking the best of TechTV and G4 and creating one network. The recommendation was to keep the TechTV brand because of its successes so far that G4 did not have.
On the web side of things we recommended keeping techtv.com and its 2 million plus monthly uniques. We would create show sites there for any G4 shows and integrate them into the TechTV.com infrastructure. Our engineers recommended keeping the co-lo and Sun servers as G4 only had two or so Windows boxes to run their site which had monthly uniques in the hundreds of thousands at the time.
G4 left with all our feedback and cam eback with the decision that they would offer 100 or so people of the around 300 at TechTV jobs in LA. The Screen Savers, X-Play and Unscerwed with Martin Sargent would continue as originally produced shows. A couple of acquired shows liek Invent This and Anime Unleashed would go on as well. However the schedule would remain largely G4 shows. The website would be G4TV.com and run out of LA and work off the existing servers plus some added capacity. The Web staff would be cut from around 40 people at TechTV to 17, including 4 or 5 existing G4 employees. Of the entire TechTV Web staff, one graphic designer from TechTV moved to LA. Overall around 80 TechTV staff took jobs at G4.
Within one month the Web traffic was cut in half. Within a few months, Unscrewed was canceled and many TechTV folks were laid off. Within 6 months G4 dropped TechTV from the name and changed The Screen Savers to Attack of The Show. The CEO of G4 eventually left the network and a new staff has taken over and tried to move the network to a more mainstream male audience, hence the star trek and man show.
It was not a happy time for TechTV staffers by any stretch, but some good TechTV folks still work at G4.
-Tom Merritt, former executive producer, techtv.com