Rerun: The Rise and Fall of G4 TV

a rather sad fate. And I did a full episode on each to kind of explain what happened with both of them, and I wanted to go back and revisit the G four TV episode. Now. The reason for this is because recent developments have changed things. There's been indication of life after cable death. But I'll explain that when we finished listening to this episode from last year, so that we understand where I'm coming from when I talk about the potential reboot of G four TV. First, let's

listen to this classic episode. This is the second episode I'm devoting to a pair of tech related television channels that made an attempt to court a tech savvy, largely male audience on cable television Our last episode was about tech TV, which I talked about up to when that channel merged with another one. Today, I'm going to focus on that other channel that would end up getting merged with tech TV before spoiler alert, both would be ultimately

shut down entirely. That tech channel was called G four TV, which was a television channel marketed towards gamers. For a bit longer than a decade, video game enthusiasts had their very own cable channel, well sort of, because the channel would change dramatically and would no longer really cater to video game people, and also G four's reach was hardly universal,

but we'll get to all that. The story of G four really starts with its founder, Charles Hershorn, who already had a long career in media before he decided to create a channel specifically for gamers. Hershorn had attended Harvard and graduated in nineteen seventy nine. He probably would have graduated in nineteen seventy eight, but he took a year off after his sophomore year to cook in professional kitchens before deciding that was not quite the life he wanted

for himself. He studied filmmaking at Harvard and was able to take advantage of some of the school's departments to get connections with various film studios and in show business. Who you know can be more important than what you know. He worked for a short while in Boston before relocating to California. He enrolled in film school at the University of Southern California, but was only there for a few

months before he dropped out. See one of those connections he had made back at Harvard paid off big time. The connection was promoted to the position of president of production for Universal Pictures, and then this connection reached out to hire her Shorn as a junior executive. Now I'm going to spend a couple of seconds just here in the studio being green with envy as I think about a guy who went from recent college graduate to junior

executive in a movie studio in no time flat. Feel free to join me in this moment of vulgar envy. Mm hmm, Okay, now I can move on, And I should add that I don't mean to comment on her Shorn's skill or knowledge. I cannot honestly say that he didn't deserve that position. He may very well have. I'm just being petty now. According to IMDb, which I should

add as not the most reliable of sources. Her Shorn served as a production assistant on the John Hughes film Sixteen Candles in four and then as an associate producer for Bull Durham and an executive producer for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. I really enjoy that last film quite a bit. And her Shorn would stay with Movies for a while before

moving over to the Fox Network. As in the television network, he came on board before the network had actually launched, and originally his role was to develop movie programming for the new television station. However, as the network got closer to launch, executive decide against having movie programming on the channel at all, and her Shorn would transition into a television executive role, something that was entirely new to him.

Her Shorn would recruit Keenan Ivory Waynes, who successfully pitched a sketch comedy show called In Living Color, which in turn would launch the careers of folks like Jim Carey, Jamie Fox, and Jennifer Lopez as among others. Her Shorn stayed with Fox for just three years, from nineteen eighty six to nineteen eighty nine, Bull Durham and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels would both come out in Night, but his involvement in those had been in the early stages of the films,

and he still did some independent production work. He then moved over to the Mouse House. He joined the Walt Disney Company as the senior vice president of production for a brand new movie studio under Disney called Hollywood Pictures, which would make films like The Santa Claus, among others. In nineteen six, Disney named her Shorn the president of Walt Disney TV, while he would also serve as executive

vice president of Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group. He stayed on until nineteen when he either left or was you know, told to leave. While Disney TV and ABC began to streamline operations and get rid of redundancies, it was in two thousand, two years after tech TV then called z d TV had launched, that her Shorn began to put together his first ideas for what would become G four. He attended the trade show E three for the first time.

That's the Big North American Video Games trade show, and according to later interviews, her Shorn originally thought about how video games have a lot of animation in them, and he had just spent a few years as president of Walt Disney Television, which produced several animated series, so maybe he thought you could do something with the animation and video games and turn it into a linear form of storytelling.

His concept evolved into a channel that would be similar to something like MTV was back in the early nineteen eighties, only instead of focusing on music and the rock and roll lifestyle cue the song by Cake here, it would use video games as the central focus for the channel. So, in other words, he wanted to engineer a channel geared toward a younger audience, with a bit of a rebellious edge,

you know, and a very corporate calculated way. Now, to be clear, there was a little bit of video game programming on television, but it was usually restricted to a segment on a longer show that was dedicated to technology

in general. And there was an online audio and video network called Pseudo Entertainment that covered, among other things, video games and included video but this was in the early two thousand's and most people lacked a good enough Internet connection to view streaming video in anything approaching decent resolution quality. More often than not, you had a thumbnail sized video running in a corner somewhere, and that's as good as

you could watch. And if you try to expand it beyond that, your connection would just chug along and you'd be buffering the entire time. Pseudo would go out of business not long after the dot com bubble began to collapse in two thousand. Also, the story behind Pseudo is like super bonkers, so I have to do an episode about that at some point. Oh and one other interesting connection. David Boorman, a TV producer, stepped in to run Pseudo

towards the end. He would also go on to produce the Tech Live block of programming I talked about for tech TV, and some of the folks from Pseudo would actually end up being part of G four. Anyway, there appeared to be at least some demand for more video game related content, and no one was meeting it just yet. So her short goes on and he founds a production company under Comcast, the cable provider. So this production company

belonged to Comcast. It was called G four Media. He hired on a consultant named Scott Rubin to help develop the concept of a video Game Channel. Reuben would go on to become the vice president of Internet I T and program editorial, and would also serve as a host on several shows. The G four name was supposedly a reference to the four types of games that would be the focal point for the channel, video game, computer games,

online games, and wireless games. And that seems a little bit confusing to me, since in two thousand two most games were pretty firmly either computer games or console games. Nearly all online games were a subset of computer games. There were very few console games that were online, and I'm guessing by wireless they really meant like handheld systems like game Boy and game Boy Advance, because cell phone

games were almost not a thing. I mean, there was Snake, but there wasn't much else in two thousand two, But hey,

who am I to criticize this logic. Also, much later, her Shorn would reveal in an interview with Kevin Pereira that he had asked his wife to secure a U r L for the new company before they had even figured out what the name was going to be, and he wanted video game to be in the name for the U r L, but his wife wasn't able to find an available U r L with video games in it, so he said, just grabbed something with the initial V or G or something, and she went down the list

and said, G once taken G two's tip and G three, G four is available, and he said, just take that. So it's possible that G four got its name because literally that was the available U r L. In case you are curious, this was during what is generally called the sixth generation of video game systems, also known as the one eight bit era, this being you know, at

the time when G four would launch. That is, Consoles belonging to this generation included the original Xbox, the PlayStation two, the Nintendo GameCube, and the Sega Dreamcast, though the Dreamcast was already starting to fade away by two thousand two, and that was the last year anyone made games for the Dreamcast outside of Japan. Uh Japan Dreamcast games would

keep on going till about two thousand and seven. The executive crew for this company would include a lot of folks from the production side of entertainment, so her Shorn would serve as president and CEO. The Chief Operating Officer or c o O was Deborah Green, who had previously been a senior vice president over at E Networks in the nineteen nineties. The head of affiliate and advertising sales, guy called Dale Hopkins, had also worked for E Networks.

The head of programming was Vince Longobardo, who had been with MTV for nearly twenty years before joining G four. The company also recognized that might be a good idea to bring in some people who have insight into video games and video game culture, and so another founding leader of G four Media was Tom Russo, who had previously been the editor of a gaming magazine called Next Generation, and of course Scott Rubin was acting as a consultant

as well. Comcast funded the development and the launch of this channel. They gave the company essentially a hundred fifty million dollars and the plan was to give G four three to five years in order to make enough money to pay off that initial investment. According to analysts, that would mean the channel would need to reach a down thirty to forty million households total, and the prime demographic, as I mentioned earlier, was eighteen to thirty four year

old men. Now keep in mind this was back in the early two thousand's when video games were still considered a sort of niche hobby for nerds. There were a lot of negative stereotypes about gamers, mostly that they were a bunch of socially awkward losers. And I used this

as the stereotype. I don't think people who are socially awkward are losers at all, but this is the kind of thought process people were in back then, that video game players were socially awkward losers who, according to most insults, lived in their parents basements and played video games, never stepped outside ever, didn't know how to talk to anybody else.

That kind of thing. That was very much a predominant stereotypical view of people who liked video games back in the early two thousand's, And it's quite possible that some of the folks at G four Media, you know, some of the people in charge, shared some of those perceptions about deo game fans. There was next to no acknowledgement that women can also play and enjoy video games too. They were just not really considered part of the equation, or that there are video game fans out there who

are also active, productive and successful members of society. And I think a lot of the guiding decisions for designing programming would be rooted in the same sort of toxic mindset that much of gamer Gate was based in. And also, while I don't want to suggest that gamer Gate was in any way a legitimate movement, I do think that G four's revenue practices would raise some eyebrows when it comes to journalistic integrity and unbiased reviews. I'll explain more

about that in just a moment. Skeptics worried that the channel would be unable to muster a following. I mean, who the heck wants to watch someone else play video games? Now? I imagine if you were to take any of those skeptics from two thousand to PLoP them into present day and turn on twitch TV or YouTube, their brains would melt right out of their ears. Now we have an entire industry complete with superstars who go by handles like Ninja or Shroud, who have built brands on top of

the concept of people watching them play video games. As for me, heck, I remember being a kid and watching really good players play arcade games. I didn't have any desire to jump in or challenge them. I just liked watching people who are really good at games kick some digital butt, so I'd like to think at least I would have felt that there was a market for this

sort of thing if it were handled properly. The Los Angeles Times reported in January two thowo that Comcast was going to launch a video game centric channel later that year. As far as I could tell, this was the earliest public acknowledgement of G four. Comcast said it would launch the channel to seven million subscribers of the company's basic cable package. That wouldn't quite be the case at launch.

The hope was that comcasts support would give a fledgling channel enough of a head start to land some good advertising deals for its programming. An article in sf Gate that published one month after the channel actually went live, which was in April two two, had a slightly different

set of figures. According to the article, G four was initially available in about three million households, with the goal of reaching five million by the end of two thousand two oh and like tech TV, it wasn't initially available in San Francisco, which, at least in the minds of the tech industry, is the center of the known universe. When the channel went live, it broadcasts something pretty unusual for its first week, a Pong marathon yep, the classic

video game Pong. It was the thirtieth anniversary for Pong, and sometimes the footage included two players going head to head against each other. Sometimes it was a player versus a computer opponent, but it was just Pong. After the first week, we'd get a better idea of what G four was going to be all about, at least at first. I'll explain more in a second, but first let's take a quick break. After the Pong marathon stunt, there were about a dozen programs that ran in heavy rotation. By that,

I mean reruns or replays of a show. Some of the shows were done live, but then would be shown again and again throughout the twenty four period. A lot of these were half hour shows, so they didn't fill up a full day's worth of programming. So shows included stuff like Cheat, a show that revealed cheat codes and strategies for games. There was a show called Blister, which was a series that focused on action and adventure games.

That show, by the way, was the first G four program to air after the week long Pong marathon concluded. There was Sweat. It was similar to Blister, except it was a show that really focused on sports video games, of course. There was a video game review show called Judgment Day that had originally started out as a segment on a show called The Electric Playground that had previously found airtime in Canada. Pulse was a news show about video games. There were shows that would do profiles on

celebrities who liked to play video games. That one was called Players. There was another show that looked at people in the industry, people who were game designers or artists or musicians that worked on games. That one was called game Makers. I actually really liked that show. There was an interactive talk show called g four tv dot com. That one was my favorite show. It was hosted by Laura Foy, Tina Wood, and Scott Rubin as the original group, and they would look at news and rumors in the

video game world. They would answer questions. People would write in and ask questions about video games that they would try to answer and it was legit a great show that I remember watching it all the time Back in those days. Cinema Tech was a bit of an odd program m. It was a thirty minute block of programming that was really just video game play footage and video game cut scenes with no hosts or really really any commentary. Then they had a couple of game show like shows.

There was one called Game On where they would grab people to compete against each other in arcade games and stuff like that, and then there was a team based show called Arena and Arena would originally feature actor Will Wheaton as one of the two hosts for the show, the other being Travis Oates. Wheaton was the only host in the G four lineup that the mainstream media really

recognized as being something of a celebrity. Everyone else who was attached to G four, at least as far as the mainstream coverage was concerned, was an unknown, though several had been working in video games and video game journalism for years, and many of them would go on to have notable careers in production, the video game industry, in entertainment, and more. For example, Judgment, the video game review show would occasionally review gaming hardware. When they do that, they

had a young woman who would showcase the hardware. She was sort of a show model showing off the stuff. That young woman happened to be Evangeline Lily, who would go on to be a big star in the j J Abrams series lost. One thing that G four paid a lot of attention to early on was its online presence. The channel had a dedicated website which hosted forums in

which members could post about various topics. Show hosts and producers were known to pop into those forums on occasion and contribute to the conversation, building a strong sense of community. I was actually on those forums back in the day. This was stuff that I didn't remember while I was researching the show. I couldn't even remember that I used to be on the forums all the time, But I did. I popped on. I remember occasionally chatting with some of

the hosts, which was kind of cool. Sometimes the host would even set up gaming sessions and which viewers could play in online games with some their favorite on air personalities. Some of the people in charge of monitoring the forums had come from other online communities, such as the Pseudo Entertainment forums. Now. According to an article in Variety, her Shorn had said that the channel had done quote better than expected in the quote in getting advertisement support for

the channel. And this is probably a good time to talk about the advertising strategy in those early days because some of the decisions that they made were fairly controversial and again would help feed into the general complaints about journalistic integrity and video game coverage. Further down the line, I would argue that G four's advertising strategy really sowed the seeds for the complaints that were at the heart

of gamer Gate. Keeping in mind the rest of gamer Gate quickly blossomed well outside of video game journalism ethics, so firstly, the better than expected comment might have been a bit us ingenuous. Early on, the channel found it difficult to fill up all the ad slots with you know, actual ads. To flesh it all out, the channel would include bumpers, station identification messages, often with celebrities who had no idea what they were identifying, and video game footage

of players going for world records. That kind of thing. Her Schorn's innovative solution was to offer the opportunity to video game developers and publishers to purchase air time dedicated to their video game titles. Essentially, the deal was to run and add as if it were actual content within a show, so there'd be a section of a show dedicated to really focusing on a specific title and to a viewer of the show, it would seem like this was part of the show's programming as opposed to a

paid for advertisement. The video game would get a couple of minutes of dedicated coverage. Shows like Pulse, which was the news show, and G four TV dot com would end up being the hosting mechanisms for these segments. It wasn't always clear to the viewer that the stuff they

were seeing was paid for content. Now, as a content creator myself, I've always felt that transparency is incredibly important, as it shows you understand your audience and you aren't going to insult their intelligence because most of us are

smart enough to recognize when someone is selling stuff to us. Now, to be fair to her Shorn and the G for channel in general, landing deals with advertisers in two thousand two was super hard for many reasons, some of which I touched on in the tech TV episode that came

out before this one. One of those reasons was that the economic impact of both the dot com bubble bursting and then the terrorist attack in the United States on September eleven, two thousand one, meant that a lot of companies were cutting way back on advertising and marketing budgets. So there just wasn't much money to go around. Complicating matters is that there were a ton of cable channels out there. Some of them, like G four, we're pretty niche in their focus, a very narrow focus on a

on a demographic. Others were a little bit more broad, and everyone was after that ad revenue because that was the main source of money for most of these cable channels, at least the ones that were not based on a subscription model. So let's say you are running an ad agency and you've got a big client that wants you to run ads on television. So you're looking at your options, and it's a buyer's market because there are so many

channels out there. They all have inventory, they all have these ad slot spaces they want to fill up, so

there's a lot of potential space out there. So do you go with a niche channel geared towards a very specific hobby and it's a channel that doesn't even reach that many households in the grand scheme of things, or do go with a channel that has a more broad appeal and reaches more homes and it's probably for a pretty similar price, because no one can ask for very high prices on their advertising at this point, well, it will surprise no one that many ad agencies would take

option number two. It just made more business sense. But it meant that G four was really having to hustle to get ads on its channel, which intern meant that the channel was hustling a lot to meet revenue goals. The company was trying to keep costs down and the shows were fairly low budget to produce, but it was still a struggle. By two thousand three, a year into the channel's existence, G four had made its way onto the basic cable package of eleven million households in the

United States. That was a big improvement, and in fact it was a bit ahead of schedule, but still far shy of that thirty to forty million households. It would need to make it look attractive enough to many big advertisers to jump on board, So the channel was caught in kind of a catch twenty two. It wasn't going to land those ad deals without getting onto more basic

cable packages. But because it was almost entirely dependent upon Comcast as a cable care earrier, and because Comcast itself had a limited number of subscribers, it wasn't likely to reach that goal, but it still the channel just kept plugging along, and besides, the channel still had a few years to go before it had to break even on that one fifty million dollars that Comcast had floated at launch. And keep in mind, I'm talking about households that could

potentially watch this channel. I'm not even talking about viewers here. I'm saying forty million households that would have G four as a viable option on their cable subscription, not even whether or not they ever watched it. Well, all of this stuff was going on behind the scenes, but in front of the cameras things were also getting very rocky.

The channels sent hosts to cover the E three event, which actually went pretty well, but towards the end of two thousand two, Travis Oates and Will Wheaton, the hosts of the show Arena, quit their jobs right in the middle of the season or towards the end of it.

Wheaton posted an explanation from his point of view about what had happened that led up to his departure, and he included allegations that a producer on the show had seriously mishandled pretty much everything A friend of mine who was a moderator for G four's online forums, wrote a blog post that said, there was more to the story than what Wheaton had shared, but sounds to me like, however you shake it out. The arena situation was particularly ugly.

G four replaced the original hosts with Lee Rareman and Michael Loudon. Loudon would later get replaced by a guy named Kevin Pereira. Kevin Pereira had been an active member of the G four forums and then he landed a gig as a production assistant for G four tv dot com and gradually worked his way up so that he could be considered for this host role. So that's how Mr Pereira got his start in front of the cameras. He would end up playing an increasingly important role over

at G four as a personality. In two thousand three, G four held its first award show, which acknowledged video game developers for stuff like best Online Game, which was Battlefield ninety two and it won that in two thousand three. In that first award ceremony, they also had categories like Best Story. Kingdom Hearts won that one. I tried to understand what Kingdom hearts this story was, but even the brilliant Brian David Gilbert couldn't get me up to speed

on that one, and I tried. The show also had awards for some more tongue in cheek categories, such as character You'd most like to be ended up being Dante from Devil May Cry two or hottest character Tina Armstrong in Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball. I think those categories were a clear indicator that the channel was really taking aim at that eighteen to thirty four male demographic.

Also feel badly for anyone who loved video games but who did not fall into this particular stereotype that the channel was catering to. I read a few posts written by women during this time who were watching programs like G four TV dot com because they love video games, but they were starting to feel purposefully ignored or alienated with just about everything else the G four channel was doing.

The channel canceled a few shows like Game On that just weren't doing very well, but ultimately the limiting factor for the channel was its reach. Comcast was able to carry G four to about fifteen million households by two four, but that's where things were capped. Comcast didn't couldn't reach more households by itself, and there was no single flagship show on the channel that was generating enough buzz to convince other cable providers and satellite companies to include G

four in their lineups. So there didn't seem to be any way to organically grow the channels reach. They would have to buy it. I'll explain more in just a second. This is where we come up to what was pretty much the end of the previous episode, the acquisition of tech TV. Now, the real purpose of that acquisition was to get G four into more homes. Tech TV had about four times the reach of G four, and the

two didn't overlap that much. G four's reach and tech TVs reach were in different areas because Comcast had been dropping tech TV from its cable lineups in different markets, and G four wasn't being carried on the various carriers that were providing tech TV. So the thought was this way they could buy that enormous amount of reach, and it would be a shortcut to get enough households to

potentially attract bigger advertisers. They would no longer be limited, they would get that thirty to forty million households they needed to have as a bargaining chip. The messaging around the acquisition was that the two channels were going to join forces and there would be programs from both channels featured on the new unified channel, but that's not what

was really happening in the background. In reality, pretty much everyone at tech TV was fired, and they were told that they might be able to land a job with the new channel, but that it wasn't a guarantee. Tech TV's base of operations was located in San Francisco, but G four was down in Los Angeles, so it would mean that a lot of people would have to relocate for a job they weren't sure they would actually have for very long. Ultimately, just three shows from tech TV

would join the G four lineup. They were the Screen Savers without host Leo Laporte, who couldn't come to an agreement with the new channel, x Play, a video game review show that had the best fit with the rest of G four's line up, and an anime show called Anime Unleashed. All the other shows on tech TV in

the United States got the ax. G four relaunched on May two, thousand four as G four tech t e V, and while tech TV had been gutted in the process, G four also canceled several of its original programs as well over the following year, including shows like Players, Pulse, Blister, Arena Portal, and eventually Judgment Day, since the executives figured there'd be no reason to run to video game review shows on the same channel, and they also canceled reruns

of an old game show called Starcade that had been playing on G four. The Screen Savers, which initially did survive the transfer over to G four, would also change dramatically.

While it was originally a show dedicated to technology in general and computers in particular, and had segments about hardware ways to fix computer problems, they took live calls from users to help them with whatever issues they were having, it would slowly drift more toward a pop culture oriented show, so while it existed in name, the show itself changed

enough to no longer really be the Screen Savers. At the top levels of leadership, there was also a change of bruin early in two thousand five, it became clear that there was a push to move G four away from being quite so video games centric, as it had been at launch. One show that the channel picked up in early two thousand five was Formula D, a television show dedicated to drift racing. I remember when that came

out and I thought, what. And the effort to cater to a male audience became even more apparent with the launch of a show called Girls Gone Wired, which was about I think you can guess, but yeah, if you really wanted to ogul video game characters, I guess that was the show for you. The channel also began to invest more in syndicated runs of shows that also aimed

at the eighteen to thirty four male audience. For example, in late two thousand five, G four would pay seven point eight million dollars to license the reruns of The Man Show from Comedy Central. It's a comedy show created by Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla that reveled in all things stereotypically identified as being manly, mostly ogling women. By February two thousand five, the pretense that G four and Tech TV where a partnership, was completely dropped and the

channel became just G four. Not that this game as a surprise to anyone What might have come as a surprise to her Shorn was that by September of two thousand five, he would be on the outs. There's not a lot that was actually written about his departure at that time, apart from the fact that Comcast quote unquote dismissed him. But whatever the circumstances were, he was replaced

by a former Direct TV executive named Neil Tiles. Tiles would push even harder to move G four away from its focus on video games, with the goal of turning it more into a lifestyle channel aimed at men, not too different from what Spiked t V was doing. Spike TV, by the way, had started off as the Nashville Network, which was all about country music and that lifestyle, then got rebranded into the National Network in two thousand and

then became Spike TV in two thousand three. Uh in two thousand eighteen, that channel also got rebranded and today that channel is called the Paramount Network, so it's changed again. G four canceled G four tv dot Com, which was a big blow to me as I had loved the show. I felt the hosts were genuine, entertaining and informative. Kevin Pereira had moved over as a host of The Screen Savers,

but that show was heading for a total rebranding. In fact, you might even argue that The Screensavers was effectively totally scrapped and a brand new show came into its place. This new show, which would become a flagship program on G four was Attack of the Show. Pereira would stay on, but the other hosts of The Screen Savers all left to pursue other opportunities. One thing Attack of the Show did was launched a huge search for a new co host.

The original goal was to hire a new male co host for the show, and at that time I was working in a consulting firm in Atlanta and wasn't terribly happy. I had a background in theater, done some radio work, but that was about it. Despite the overwhelming odds, I chose to travel to one of the three cities where they held initial auditions. I remember San Francisco was one, another was Los Angeles, and I believe the third was New York. And boy, wouldn't this be a cool story

if I had landed that gig. I didn't. In fact, nobody did. Attack of the Show would have a few finalists of that audition process that would host a segment or two on the show is sort of a trial, but ultimately G four didn't hire any of them. Instead, a bit later they hired another host, who they quickly replaced with the actress Olivia m who would go on to become one of the biggest stars to really first

make her name at G four. Oh and and this is no shade on ms Munn, who I readily admit was a much better choice for what they wanted than than I would have been. A dumpy, bald dude from Georgia. Olivium On was hands down the best choice. G four made the right call on that one. By two thousand six, the only original G four show still on the air was Cinema Tech. Everything else by that point had been canceled.

Every original G four show was no longer on the network, and Cinema Tech pretty much featured gameplay and cut scenes from games, so you can't get much more low budget than that when it comes to production costs. I mean, I imagine there were probably some licensing fees that had to be paid, but that's about it. Cinema Tech, however, would finally get canceled in two thousand seven, and then none of the original G four shows would be still

with the network. In two thousand seven, the channel didn't look anything like it's a incarnation. Pereira and Munn continued to host Attack of the show, and Pereira was really the only link back to the old crew, and even then you have to remember that he had started on

camera as a co host on Arena. G four continued to strike deals to run reruns of other shows on the channel, and this is when G four kind of turned into the Cops and Ninja Warrior channel, which you gotta be honest, I love Ninja Warrior that I still love American Ninja Warrior. Those men and women are incredible. But G four also began showing reruns of the series Cheaters, and the audience that had been there for the launch

of the channel was pretty much completely alienated. Don't even think about how the Tech TV audience felt they had seen their programming get obliterated in the process. The only show that remained from the Tech TV days that had not really been tampered with that much was Explay, and even that one got a little wackier over time. The little bit of lips service G four paid to video games at that point was disastrous, Like they couldn't do

that right. The channel sent crews to E three to cover press conferences, but because G four had to run commercials and because these were live events, those two things didn't go together. That great ads would interrupt highly anticipated presentations such as the reveal of Mass Effect or the Halo three trailer, and the message was clear, video games

just weren't important to G four anymore. The channel did try to create a few animated series like Happy Tree, Friends and Code Monkeys, which featured the Fantastic Song by Jonathan Colton as the theme. These didn't get enough of a following to last more than a season or two, and rather than risk launching more failures, G four continued to pour money into licensing deals so that the channel could run reruns of other shows like Heroes and Lost.

Those licensing fees cost a lot of money, but the thinking was, these shows have already a proven track record. But here was the problem. People had already seen those shows because you know, they had already aired on broadcast television. You didn't even need a cable subscription to watch them.

The two shows that were really doing well were Attack of the show and explay, So you could argue that the programs that actually were performing well in the channel were the ones that catered to its original intended audience, although that's a stretch for Attack of the Show since it really didn't resemble the screen savers at all at that point. Also, bother of those shows came out of or grew out of the Tech TV programming, not the G four programming. Things were not going great. The best

performing shows at their peak. We're bringing in a hundred thirty thousand viewers around this time, and that's nothing in TV land. Cable carriers began to drop G four from their lineups in order to replace it with something that might attract more viewers. In November, Direct TV dumped G four. The was an enormous setback, and it pretty much erased the effect G four had of acquiring tech TV back

in two thousand four. Remember, the real reason for that acquisition was to get the channel on more cable and satellite carriers. Olivia Munn announced she was leaving G four and Attack of the Show in two She had landed a role on an NBC show called Perfect Couples UH that would launch in early eleven and that show would end up getting canceled a few months later, but Man dedicated her attention and time to pursuing her acting career.

She landed gigs and films and TV series. Her departure was a big blow to G four, as her onscreen chemistry with Pereira was one of the big reasons attack of the show was doing so well. Actress Candice Bailey would step in to become the new co host of the show. While things were super rocky, they wouldn't end just yet. The channel was able to hold on for a couple more years. Back in two thousand nine, Comcast announced its intent to merge with NBC Universal, which was

a process that was completed in twleven. In early Neil Tynes would step down as president of the channel and Adam Stotsky, who had previously been the president of NBC's entertainment division, would take on the leadership role. But one thing Stotsky did not have, notably was experience in actual television programming. He did have experience with branding, however, and Stotsky worked to try and land a deal in which

G four would undergo an entire transformation. It would undergo a full rebranding into the Esquire Network, but that deal ultimately fell through and instead the Style Network would get that rebranding instead. Turns out it wouldn't have mattered. The Esquire Network ceased to be in twenty seventeen anyway. In two thousand twelve, ex Play host Adam Sessler began hearing rumors that his days were numbered as a host on

the channel. In April of that year, he was officially fired for reasons I've never been able to determine, apart from perhaps the channel just wanted to cut costs and Sessler, as a longtime veteran, might have had a pretty high salary comparatively speaking. He would end up with Revision three for a while, so for a short time we were technically co workers. The following month, Kevin Pereira announced he was leaving G four and Attack of the show after the E three trade show in June of that year.

His departure was pretty much the death blow two Attack of the show, though it would limp along for the rest of two thousand twelve, shooting the final episode in December two thousand twelve that would not air until January two thirteen, so technically most people say. The show lasted till X Play also aired its final show at that same time. G four would continue to run reruns, but

slowly those licensing deals were expiring. By November, there just wasn't enough there there, and NBC announced that the channel would go off the air. It was done. The Canadian version of G four, which I haven't really talked about here and which would carry much more of the old tech TV programming for much longer, would last until two thousand and seventeen, so it outlived the American version of

G four and the American version of tech TV. In fact, it outlived the Esquire Network, the channel that that G four was supposed to turn into. Now there's a lot more that can be said about this story, and like I've indicated a few times, the big story here is not unique to G four. There were a lot of channels that started out catering to a specific core audience. But the demands of the industry typically say, it's not good enough for you to do well. It's not good

enough for you to get good ratings. You need to grow year over year. Those ratings need to get better each year, and eventually to grow you have to expand beyond your core audience. You can't just keep appealing to the same people to watch more stuff. Now, I perly think growth on its own is not the best measure for success, and it can lead to catastrophic failures and bad decisions like it did with G four. But what the heck do I know. I'm just a tech podcaster.

But it was interesting going back and looking at the history of these two channels. They had a huge influence on me. In fact, I think I can honestly say that without tech TV, without G four, and also without the influence of c nets buzz out Loud podcast, there never would have been a tech stuff I never would have even thought to do a technology podcast without those predecessors. And while I cannot attest to being nearly as informative or entertaining as those shows could be and those channels

could be, I do my humble best. So G four TV, you know, it came, and it went, and it's I thought it was just gone forever. And then in late July tw the G four TV Twitter account, which people were shocked to find out was still uh, you know, accessible, tweeted out a teaser that showed a game upon playing in the message saying we never stopped playing and giving the year of twenty one, thus indicating that G four TV is returning in the channel that we all thought

was gone forever. A little bit later, Blair Herder, who has a long history with G four TV, suggested and ask me anything or a m a on Reddit and began to answer some questions. Uh clearly couldn't answer everything, but gave us a little bit more information about what this return actually is going to look like. Part of it looks like it's going to be a web series. It also looks like they're going to attempt to get hold of episodes of asked G four TV programming, stuff

that hasn't been seen in years. Mr Herder said, um about that quote. While I technically have access to G four's archive of old shows, they're locked in a musty burbank tape vault in a secret company basement that we literally can't access right now because of COVID No joke, but stay tuned. I'll be pulling out the old VHS machine as soon as the pandemic lets me. In the meantime, please let us know what shows you'd like to see.

End quote. So it looks like there's at least the possibility for older programming to be seen yet again, and then what about new programming. Well, the general consensus is that Attack of the Show and Explay will both return in some form, though no telling who will be hosting it. Uh, there's no real indication of which hosts might be returning. In fact, a lot of them expressed utter surprise and shock when G four TVs Twitter account even posted that

was coming back. The whole endeavor is part of Comcast and NBC Universal, so it's got a big company behind it, but we just don't really know too much about what's going to manifest from this. One thing that I can say is that G four TV has opened up casting for whatever programming they have in mind. Even though we don't know very much about it, we do know they're

looking for talent and uh. In fact, there is an email address you can send information to casting at g four tv dot com, and I would recommend looking into that if you're interested. But I would also recommend you know, looking over any agreements if you actually do get into the whole process, because these sort of jobs require an awful lot of focus, a lot of energy, a lot of time, a lot of effort. It is. It is not easy work to create content. It's great work, it's

not easy. So you want to make sure that any agreement is uh fair to both you and to the employer. And that means, you know, don't just if you get an offer. For those out there who are going to try and apply, if you get an offer, look it over. Make sure it's fair. And I'm not saying that it wouldn't be. I just don't know, and I know that there are a lot of horror stories about people who got into agreements because they really wanted to do this thing.

They always wanted to create content and then turned into something that was a lot harder and a lot bigger of the demand and not as much return as what they needed in order to make a living. So just be careful, is all I'm saying. But I am excited to see G four TV comeback, in whatever format it will re emerge in. I have a lot of fond

memories of watching G four TV. I mean, I did audition for them once upon a time, So you know, I want to see them succeed, and I want to see all the people attached to it succeed as well. So I have high hopes. I have no idea what to expect, but I thought it would be good to rerun this episode, remind everyone what G four TV was all about, and to start looking forward to see what

will come next. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a technology, a company, trend in tech, whatever it may be, let me know reach out on Twitter to handle this Text Stuff hs W, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Eight