Big Media at it again - the Killing of TechTV

Back five or six years ago, my then roommates and I got our first satellite antenna and one of the networks that we spent lots of time watching was a computer/tech/gadget-oriented "ZDNet." "ZD" was from Ziff Davis, a publisher of computer magazines. There were lots of cool shows and some not-so-cool ones, but a good mixture of subjects was covered to suit various interests. They had kind of general news and tips shows called The Screen Savers, a show for novices, Call for Help, a McLaughlin-esque round-table of pundits arguing about the latest industry trends with the curmudgeonly John C. Dvorak as host, a gaming show, and others that don’t come immediately to mind. I enjoyed them immensely. Perhaps I enjoyed them a bit too much as I remember having to stop for months at a time due to oversaturating myself with the stuff.

In 2002 I moved in with my then girl friend and got cable, but alas the cable in DC did not include ZDNet, which by then had been rebranded as "TechTV." I was bummed! When we eventually moved back out of DC earlier this year and got satellite again, I searched for TechTV but found nothing. Then I discovered that TechTV had been bought out by some video game network. While a show about the latest hottest games out there is fun to watch once in a while, I don’t consider myself a gamer. I actually try to stay away from the things because I know from past experience how addictive they can be. While some may say to this - "so what’s the problem with that?" now that I’m a real adult with a wife and a house and a career, spending 6pm to 7am online all night gaming is not exactly conducive to this kind of life! Or perhaps I should say that the other way around?

So, I wrote off my past affection to TechTV and went on my way. Just a couple of weeks ago, I saw that Leo LaPorte, who was the host of a couple of shows on TechTV, had his own radio show that had the same themes as his TV shows. Not only that, but he was podcasting his shows, as well as hosting an online community around the show. I started listening to some of his podcasts and got greatly nostalgic for the old TechTV. Leo, for those who never saw his shows or have never heard him on the radio, is just the perfect host for a computer show. He’s honest, friendly, goofy, caring, smart, and genuinely interested in helping people at all levels, never arguing, correcting, or putting people down. He also shows interest in peoples' lives outside of technology, which is always nice. It’s great to geek out and all, but when that consumes everything and there’s no room for anything outside of geekdom, it can get pretty bland and isolating.

Anyway, I was listening to Saturday’s show and Leo began talking about G4TechTV. Apparently Comcast (the Cable company) owned a channel on video gaming that was struggling. Earlier this year they bought TechTV and merged the two in order to increase viewership. Unfortunately they did away with most of the TechTV shows, favoring their G4 Gaming shows instead. The one that remained was The Screen Savers, but Leo among others, were let go and the remaining staff were forced to move from San Francisco to LA or lose their jobs as well.

After listening to Leo’s earlier podcasts last week, I started TiVo'ing Screen Savers. What I learned today listening to Leo's podcast from Saturday, was that G4TechTV had actually let go a bunch of staff, including some of the on-camera folks from Screen Savers. Apparently this actually happened over a week ago and since then they have just been showing repeats! So the repeats that I was watching over the last several days had a staff that will be gone when the new shows finally start coming again (supposedly next Monday). While not comparable to Leo’s earlier shows, the episodes I watched were not as bad as I first expected. My only complaint would be that it seemed like they intentionally sped things up to keep what they probably think is their target audience's (teen gamers') attention. Also the last show that I TiVo’d on Sunday night had a split screen where they showed the new Nintendo DS footage at the bottom half and the Screen Savers at the top. This made the Screen Savers video so small that it was unwatchable and while I could have just listened to it, I decided not too on principle! I mean, come on, if I’m watching a show because that’s what interests me, why are you killing half of it to show me something else? It's like if NBC decided to do a split screen to show The Biggest Loser on the bottom of the screen while they showed West Wing on the top. While the shows may share some of the same audience, in the end, both of these audiences lose out when the distraction level and minimized screen sizes make the shows much harder to watch.

So there is still no real scoop on what is going on at G4TechTV regarding The Screen Savers other than it is reorganizing. There is no clue as to who will be hosting the show, or really anything. Some of the current and former staff of the show have commented on their blogs, but mostly pretty briefly and very professionally. The only real commentary is on a thread on Yoshi’s (one of the show’s hosts who was let go) forums from watchers, in the comments of some of the current or former staff’s blogs, in other blogs of watchers like myself, even in G4TechTV's own forums, and in Leo’s Saturday show. The general reaction from these third parties are generally justified digust. Leo said that in his view the network was basically imploding and would probably be gone sooner or later. Some rumor on Yoshi’s forum proposed what sounds like a conspiracy theory (but perhaps not as unbelievable as it might initially sound) that Comcast bought TechTV, G4’s biggest competitor, in order to slowly kill off all of its shows and then eventually (by the beginning of next year) go back to being 100% about games and even ditching the TechTV part of their name.

All I can say is “how sad.” I realize business is business, but it really seems unfortunate for all involved: for the staff that had worked and built a great lineup of shows who were unceremoniously dumped earlier in the year; for those who actually made the move to LA only to be let go less than a year later; and for all of the faithful watchers of TechTV who had their shows ripped away. But maybe, as Leo was commenting in his podcast, this is just a sign of things to come. As we see over and over and over again, “Big Media” just doesn’t get it. They are obsessed with marketing to the hottest market in town – that of teenagers and early 20-something’s – and could care less about anyone else. They are driven by stockholders who want to see constant growth of profits in a skittish market. They are obsessed with ownership rights and feel threatened by even the slightest ability for people to fairly and reasonably use technology to view content the way they want rather than the way the content company wants. The audience is seen as a bunch of deadbeats who, given the opportunity, will steal their product and give it to all their friends, thus bankrupting them. Perhaps part of this is due to what they see as their target audience and how that young audience isn’t mature enough to understand the consequences of their actions. It’s a catch 22, unless of course these companies start looking outside of their current narrow tunnel vision and start looking at the big picture and where things are headed, whether they come along for the ride or not.

Leo, I think correctly, envisions a time when media is distributed like podcasts to audiences of all sizes. Sure a lot of it will be crappy home-grown stuff, and I’m not sure where the revenue stream will be to help support the people who want to make these, unless they actually embed commercials in their content too. Maybe IPTV and podcasting and PVR technology will merge in the not too-distant future and instead of having a choice of two or three hundred channels of content delivered by a handful of companies, we will have thousands of choices, perhaps tens of thousands or more, from almost as many different sources. I’m not sure how this will change the dynamic (except that it will probably change it profoundly), but it seems like the current system has so many problems when networks can be destroyed by competitors (whether intentionally or not), and great shows with cult followings (Sports Night or Freaks and Geeks anyone?) get ditched because they were aired on Friday or Saturday nights where they never had a real chance to thrive.

I wish all the folks at TechTV luck – this stuff reminds me way too much of the internet bubble and crash from a few years ago that I narrowly missed participating in. It must be terribly stressful working in an environment like this where your job is constantly on the line. Then again, I suppose this has always been the case for most of media, or show business. When the numbers are down, your show isn’t worth as much to advertisers and so your neck gets closer and closer to the chopping block. Maybe one solution for the future would be a kind of open-source movement for media and entertainment. If you like a piece of audio or video content, a piece of fiction or even a blog entry, you could commit to a one time (or repeating) donation of a few cents or a bit more. This of course relies on people actually wanting to voluntarily sacrifice hard earned money in order to keep stuff on the “air” which cynics would say is pretty doubtful, and even optimists would admit is a big challenge. Yet National Public Radio and Public TV have been doing this pretty successfully for years! They also get government funding, and block out all programming for days a few times per year to plead for money. I don’t know how things will go down in the scheme of things, but it’s a very interesting period for media right now and things may get a lot worse and more confusing before they get better.

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