Author Topic: NBC Late night shuffle  (Read 2979 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline Coladar

  • Posts: 2826
Re: NBC Late night shuffle
« Topic Start: March 10, 2013, 01:26:22 AM »
Did the now non-existent channels about technology and games also tank in ratings?  I know cable channels don't generally kill in those things, but if there was nobody watching, it's not that hard to figure out why they'd disappear.  Especially since those that are tech savvy don't go to obscure cable channels to learn about technology, they go to google.  And gamers don't go to obscure cable channels to learn about games, they're playing them.

It never existed to fail. It's a convoluted story, but once upon a time there was ZDTV/TechTV. Filled to the brim with original programming catering to technology. Comcast starts G4, wanting to be the SpikeTV of gaming. Problem? It's owned by Comcast. Nobody else would carry it on their system.

Problem solved! Comcast buys TechTV, and gets instant carriage on basically every provider around. Ahh, but G4 already has it's own thing, it's own programming, all catering to 13 year old boys. TechTV, with 50 somethings like Leo Laporte and John Davorak? Doesn't mesh. Worse still, TechTV records in San Francisco and G4 in LA. G4 guts the entirety of TechTV, firing everybody and canceling everything but Extended Play, the half hour video game show. Tech's most successful property, The Screen Savers, had it's talent removed within a month of G4 ownership before being canceled and replaced with Attack of the Show.

G4 was a failure when it was only on Comcast, and as soon as they got into every home with TechTV the same 0.0002% (exaggerating) ratings applied. Only instead of 0.0002% of, say 1million homes, it was 0.0002% of 30 million.

TechTV had a large audience. It was a successful venture, aside from their experiment during the day to compete with CNBC. The Screen Savers and Call For Help had decent ratings right up til Comcast gutted it. Of those G4 squandered, Kevin Rose of Digg.com fame, and several folks behind both the Revision3 and This Week In Tech podcasts/video that remain successful today.

NBC now controls said G4 failure, and instead of realizing the G4 experiment never worked and returning to TechTV they decide to compete with Spike as GQ. A network dedicated to technology worked for several years, and it still would today. Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton, TechTVs stars, have devoted followings producing the same content for the web that they did for TechTV. Heck, all NBC need do is buy one of them and put their stuff on TV. It worked once. Cobrand it with SyFy? Science fact and science fiction? It'd make too much sense for the idiocy of NBC Universal.

If anyone thinks a technology network would be interesting, I strongly suggest checking out This Week In Tech and Revision3. Each uses TechTV's talent and produces several shows per week, catering to any interest one might have. Apple shows, Google ones, gaming, home theatre tech, whatever. This Week In Tech is Twit's general purpose show, Tekzilla Revision3's. Both worth a gander.

Http://revision3.com
Http://twit.tv