The TechTV Story

geared toward a tech savvy audience, specifically computer nerds. It was a channel that included reviews, how to guides, interactive programs, and a bunch of stuff that really geeky computer nerds like yours truly would really be interested in. It was an attempt to build out some niche programming that ultimately lasted about six years before things would change dramatically and the channel would get merged into a different niche oriented

cable chan annel. So today we're going to talk about tech TV, and in our next episode, I will cover the story of G four TV, the channel that tech TV would get merged into in two thousand four. So spoiler alert for that, I guess uh. I will attempt to tell all of G four's story, including what happened after the merger in one episode. We'll see if that

pans out, because a lot happened in those years. So one thing I do want to mention is that these episodes were a little challenging to research simply because a lot of the information about them happened to be online on their own websites, and once those channels ceased to exist, because neither of them are around anymore, a lot of that web based material just kind of lapsed. People didn't maintain the sites, companies stopped paying for hosting fees, and

a ton of information disappeared. And I our databases, and I went through the Internet archive and I looked at lots of different stuff to get a kind of a big picture of what was going on. And I should also mention that a lot of the decisions made both at tech TV and G four resulted in a lot of hurt feelings among the employees there, and as a result, there's a lot of um Vitriolic is a good word,

of hashion. It is another good word. There are a lot of high emotion type texts and messages and articles that were written in blog posts that kind of thing that we're written in the wake of both Tech TV and G four. So trying to parse all that and get to the nuggets of truth that are buried in a lot of emotional baggage can sometimes be a bit challenging, and it's understandable why there was so much emotional baggage.

We'll get into all of that. So the story of tech TV starts with a publishing company that was originally founded by William Ziff Sr. And Bernard Davis way back in nineteen seven, decades before there would ever be any dream of a cable television channel. Obviously, the original name for this publishing company was Popular Aviation Company, named after the magazine it published, Popular Aviation, But before very long, the founders decided to rename the company and call it

the Ziff Davis Publishing Company. Now, this company largely focused on hobbyist topics. Hobbyists tend to be a passionate customer base, and they tend to have a lot of disposable income because hobbies cost money to maintain, and it was relatively easy to get companies that catered to hobbyists to advertise in those magazines, so it wasn't hard to sell ad space. So when we skip ahead a few decades, into the

nineteen eighties. Because obviously this is not an episode about Ziff Davis the publishing company, it should come as a little a little surprise to anyone really that the publishing company soon explored magazines catering to computer enthusiasts. Ziff Davis, then under the control of williams If Senior's son, clearly William Jr. Purchased the publishing rights to a magazine called PC Magazine in nineteen two. PC Magazine had just started

publishing only a few months earlier. This would usher in a new era for Ziff Davis, one that was increasingly connected to the world of technology. That wasn't necessarily by choice. Zif the younger had developed cancer and he wished to simplify the magazine empire of Ziff Davis in the early nineteen eighties. By that time, the publishing company was enormous, so it would sell off two big branches of the company.

One was the Consumer Group Magazines, which had sold to CBS, and the other was the Business Group Magazines, which it sold off to Rupert Murdoch. Ziff Davis, the company really only held onto the computer magazine titles. PC Magazine would go into great some might say excruciatingly great detail about computer specs and recommendations, and it really was not for

the computer illiterate. It also did quite well, growing to become one of the top ten largest magazines in the US by and if Davis would complement this with other magazines such as a one called Mac User, so for the Mac users out there, not just the PC owners and others. And back in the nineteen eighties, the company had acquired the Information Access Company, which was an early electronic publishing organization. It largely oversaw lots of databases that

were useful for library functions. If Davis would build upon this innovation with the development of zif net and electronic version of various magazines that the publisher offered to subscribers of online service providers like American Online or Prodigy, then the company became an online service provider of its own with the Interchange Online Network, though that would not go

live before the company would get broken up. Spoiler alert now, in case you're not familiar with the termin online service provider was sort of a predecessor to the internet service providers we use today. The online service providers would offer access to a computer network and sometimes limited access to the Internet at large, and keep in mind that in the very early days there was no Worldwide Web yet, so it would usually mean things like email exchanges and

uh FDP servers that kind of thing. OSPs would provide news, entertainment and communication services like email, although depending on the USP, you might be limited to sending and receiving email with other members of that same online service provider. There wasn't necessarily interser of us connectivity between different online service providers in the early days. After Ziff Jr. Would retire, the Ziff Davis Publishing Company got broken up a second time.

The publishing arm would go to an investment firm called Fortsman, Little and Company for the princely sum of one point for billion. With a B dollars, the Soft Bank Corporation from Japan would buy a division called Ziff Davis Exhibitors, which organized and managed computer trade shows, and the Information Access Company would go to the Thompson Corporation and A T and T would scoop up the Interchange Online network. Now, despite this breakup, the publishing arm continued business as usual,

growing in the process. By it launched a new magazine called Yahoo Internet Life. Obviously inspired by Yahoo the web portal, and it was kind of described as the TV guide for the Internet. That same year, soft Bank, which you know I just mentioned had purchased the exhibitor part of Ziff Davis back in decided it was gonna try again because it had tried to buy the publishing branch but got outbid by Fortsman Little. So SoftBank went to Fortsman Little and said, tell you what, We'll give you two

point one billion dollars for the publishing arm. Now keep in mind Fortsman had purchased this publishing arm for one point four billion dollars the year before, so this was a pretty good deal, you know, turning around and selling it for two point one billion dollars. So soft Bank then took ownership of the Ziff Davis publishing part of the business. In as part of the launch of the MSNBC cable channel, Ziff Davis dipped its corporate toe in

the waters of TV programming. The company produced an hour long show called The Site s I T E. Solo. Doda Brian acted as host for the show. She would go on to do many amazing things in TV and beyond, and she had a motion capture animated sidekick named dev Null, voiced by a certain Leo Laporte, who would go on to become a host on the future tech TV. I'm sure it must have been a lot of fun seeing

Leo in that motion capture suit. The site was a technology news and culture program that focused primarily on the Internet. It also had a companion website that complimented the programming on the television show. Now. Sadly, the site the TV show didn't last very long. MSNBC would preempt episodes of the show in in the wake of Princess Diana's death,

and the show never returned to air. Instead, in MSNBC changed formats to become a twenty four hour news channel and Ziff Davis would hire back all the staff of the show with a new goal. They decided that they were going to launch a dedicated television channel, a cable channel of its very own, and it was going to leverage the expertise it had with its print and web content and adapted for the medium of television. Now, the ownership of the channel, which was originally not called tech TV.

The original name was z d TV gets a bit confusing, so originally it was not the Ziff Davis division of soft Bank that would own this channel. Instead, a soft Bank affiliate holding company called MAC owned the channel. And maybe it pays to talk about that a bit, because I think the corporate ownership of Ziff Davis gives us a little bit of insight into how much or how little support initiatives like z d t V would get from its corporate overlords. Okay, So soft Bank is an

investment company and it's it's headquartered in Japan. It's publicly traded and was and still is led by a guy named Masa Yoshi. San San owns a large stake of soft Bank, and he did it through this holding company MAC M a C. And he used companies kind of like how a magician uses cups and balls. So to avoid affecting soft Bank's bottom line and thus the value of its shares, he used the MAC company to purchase

some of the more risky divisions for acquisitions like Ziff Davis. So, in other words, if it was part of a company that made money, it could go to soft Bank because that would help boost SoftBank's numbers and it would improve the price on the shares. But if it was a loss making business, if it was something there's a little more risky, MAC would scoop it up because it was a private company, and as a private company it could

sort of eyed those losses. So in other words, all the hits would go to soft Bank, all the strikes would go to MAC, which could just sort of absorb it as divisions stabilized. Sun would oversee soft Bank purchasing those divisions back from Mac, frequently at cost. So essentially he was transferring ownership from one company, a private company, to another, a public company. So z d t V

would initially fall under MAC Holdings. That was essentially the American version of the Mac company that Saun was using in Japan, and about a year after that things would change. MAC, the Japanese one would get merged into soft Bank, ostensibly to improve transparency, and if Davis would buy z d t V from Mac Holdings in late n But a little bit of other stuff happened in between the launch of z d t V in early nine d eight

and z if David's purchasing the rights over from MAC Holdings. Now, the reason that all of this is important, apart from the fact that it illustrates how extremely rich people manipulate systems. In order to get even more rich is that for a time it hid z d t vs financial performance, and I'll get to that in a second. The channel would launch on May tenth or May eleventh. Really was announced on the tenth and really launched on the eleventh,

but it also launched in a very limited distribution. Larry Weinberg, who had previously served as president and CEO of a cable television company, would sign on as president and CEO of z d t V, and originally z d TV was only available on a few smaller cable providers like clear Vision Cable or Helicon Cable, and Georgia, where I'm from, there was a little carrier called Teleview that offered it. I was not a tele of View customer, so I actually remained completely ignorant of zd TV and later tech

tv for quite some time. A bit later in the summer, of Direct TV and z d TV would put together a carriage deal that would put the new programming on channel two hundred seventy three of the satellite TV service. That would also mark the first time that certain people in San Francisco, that being Direct TV customers where z d t V was actually shot, could finally watch the channel. In fact, for a very long time in the z

d TV tech TV history. Despite the fact that it was shot and produced in San Francisco, most people in San Francisco had no access to the show. They couldn't watch it. The company decided not to publish how many households it would reach on its debut, but analysts estimated that was likely fewer than a million households. Now, keep in mind that meant that the channel would be available

for fewer than one million households. Presumably, even on the households that got the channel, not all of them were going to be glued to the television to watch tech related contents. So we're talking about significantly fewer than one million viewers. But you gotta start somewhere. Now. I'll get to some of the programs that the channel carried in

the next section of this episode. But first I want to mention that in November of just half a year after the channel had debuted, a company called Vulcan Ventures would invest more than fifty million dollars into z d t V in exchange for one third ownership of the company. Now, Vulcan Ventures had a famous founder Paul Allen, co founder of a little company called Microsoft. This is also around the time when Ziff Davis would exercise its options to

buy z d t V from Mac Holdings. Now I mentioned the financial performance a second ago by The Times.

If Davis would buy z d t V from Mac Holdings, the Ziff Dave subsidiary overall had an operating profit of thirty one point one million dollars, and because z d t V wasn't organized under Zif Davis, the channels operating losses would not affect that company's budget sheets, which is a good thing, because it turned out that z d t V had operated at a loss of forty seven point five million dollars, which means the channel's losses were more than ten million dollars greater than the operating profit

of the entire Ziff Davis company, including all the magazine publishing, which is scary. Now. Granted, the launch was at best a modest one, and the startup costs of launching a cable channel are incredibly high. You could say they're pretty substantial, so it would have been remarkable if z d TV had turned a profit in its first year. But this would create a pretty hefty burden on the little channel

and for Ziff Davis in general. On the other hand, Paul Allen had also made another significant purchase that could give the fledgling channel a little bit of a boost. He had purchased Charter Communications, a cable TV operator, for four and a half billion With a B dollars. In November of Vulcan Ventures would strike a deal to acquire the rest of the shares of z d TV, buying it from Ziff Davis. So now it would become wholly

owned by Vulcan Ventures. The channel would continue with its original name for nearly a year more until September two thousand, when it would rebrand itself as tech TV. Now. I'll have more to say about this in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break. So one thing I want to mention before I go into the sorts of shows that were on z d t V and then tech TV, is a bit of confusion regarding the channel and then the company c Net, which is today

part of CBS. I've seen some videos and read some news reports even some articles that conflated c nets purchase of z d net, which was a family of websites that were operated by Ziff Davis and z d t V the television channel. So to clear this up, c NET purchased z d net and these two things were competitors. Zd net actually for a while was out performing c NET back in those days, but it did not include the television channel that remained under Paul Allen's general ownership

through Vulcan Ventures. This did complicate things a little bit because up until the acquisition, some of the content from z d t V would then be featured on the z d net sites, so maybe that's where the confusion stems from. Also, Vulcan Ventures, Paul Allen's investment company, at one time nearly owned twenty percent of all the shares of c NET, but the company, the investment company, had begun divesting itself of those shares leading up to the

purchase of z d TV. That also makes it all confusing. But the important thing to remember here is that c NET did not at any time acquire z d t V and thus tech TV. Now, when the channel went on the air, there was a mixture of excitement and skepticism about its fate. It's a cliche and it's obvious, but was a very different landscape from today. Back in less than half of all American homes even owned a computer, and only about a quarter of all American households had

Internet access. So there was a question, and it seemed a legitimate one, was there even enough demand to support a tech oriented computer NERD targeted twenty for our cable channel, particularly one that was going to focus heavily on the Internet. Now, on the flip side of that, the Internet was considered virgin territory, wide open landscape, just ripe for making your fortune. It was like a gold rush, So there was a lot of optimism about how important the Internet was going

to be in the very near future. So in that sense, they were kind of taking a gamble, but they felt like it was a gamble that was pretty sure it was going to pay off. But let's talk a little bit about the programming on the channel. When z DTV launched in it had around six hours of programming a day that would repeat to create the twenty four hour cable TV channel. The programming, most of which was live.

By the way, they would actually broadcast live for the initial uh airing of the shows ran across a pretty decent spectrum of the computer experience. There was an on air tech advice show called Call for Help, and that one was aimed at people who are either new to computers or only had a little experience with them, hosted famously by Leo Laporte. One thing the channel did early on was to offer free net cameras or web cameras

to users who registered on the show's online forums. If they wanted to ask a question, they could register, they could get a camera sent to them. They would hook up the camera and then their web camera footage would actually be used in the show. So you do a live call, your video would be up on screen as you're asking people for computer advice. Let's say that you're having an issue with your computer crashing and you're calling them to find out what you can do to solve

this problem. It was a really neat idea and it really built a sense of community among the viewers. The channel also had a half hour show that focused on new tech called Fresh Gear UH. There was also a money oriented computer show called The the Machine that gave users advice on how to leverage computers to do stuff

like make financial investments. UH. There was also the entertainment and news segment that was mostly covered in a show called Internet Tonight that featured segments about Internet trends, rumors, news, They had segments on music, They had segments on memes before we called them memes. Funny little side note. While I was researching this episode, I happened to read an article that had a fully embedded episode of Internet Tonight

on it. I believe it was for July, so I watched a good good amount of it just to kind of get a feel for what it was like. And you know, it was a fairly slick production that was covering tech news, and I thought it was pretty interesting. I scrubbed through it and just around nineteen minutes and thirty seconds or so, it goes into a segment about a website that was pretty useful. That website turned out

to how stuff works dot com, which I found really amusing. Obviously, being someone who had worked for how Stuff Works since two thousand seven, h seeing a feature from about the website really tickled me. Also, boy, the website has come a long way since those days, but it did make me chuckle. There was another show called Silicon Spin, hosted by John C. Dvorak, who was an editor for PC magazine,

which she will remember, was a magazine published by Ziff Davis. Uh. He kind of gave an opinion show about technology and tech news and developments. One of the big shows to come out of this debut was called The Screen Savers, another computer oriented show that included reviews, advice, and news. This one also was hosted by Leo Laporte and Kate Botello. This show, like Call for Help, often include questions from viewers to help solve issues they were having with their

computer systems, and also would include net camera footage. This show was more are for intermediate to advanced computer users. You know, they didn't really pussy foot around talking about you know, computer terminology and and and tech terms, and if you didn't know your stuff at least the basics, you can very quickly get lost. So this was something that appealed to a lot of the tech savvy audience because they felt like they weren't being patronized, they weren't

being talked down to. This show would undergo massive changes over the following years, usually involving it being dialed back from being quite so tech heavy to the point where by the time it was in its final incarnation, you could argue it was unrecognizable. Now, it was a pretty bold move to put out this kind of niche oriented programming out on the air. Now at this time, we're we're also seeing a lot of other channels that were

catering to specific interests. Channels like MTV had paved the way for other cable channels that would focus on specific subject matter, though by this time MTV had already drifted far away from its origins as music television that is what MTV used to stand for. Channels like the Learning Channel, which would later become TLC, and Sci Fi which would later become SIFFY, and American Movie Classics which would later become a MC, we're all attempting to build audiences using

a sort of laser like focus on subject matter. The idea was, if you focus on a specific topic, you can dominate for that topic and you can become the go to source. Now, as we'll see when we talk about G four in our next episode, the strategy would shift away from catering to that core audience over time in an effort to build out a larger viewership, something we've seen time and time again, not just with tech TV and G four, but MTV is a great example.

That was an early example of how we would see that at and show channels like the Learning Channel or TLC as another great example, and sci Fi as another one, and even Cartoon Network that's another one. Well. According to Russ Pitts, who served as a line producer on the Screen Savers, employees were not told how many people were

actually watching the programs. The best and employee could hope for at the time was an estimate of how many people could potentially watch a show based on the number of households that z d t V was reaching, like how many how many cable companies were actually carrying z d t V By the middle of that was around eleven million households, and four million of those were through cable providers and the other seven million were through satellite

television providers. Two years after the channel went on the air, the bottom fell out under the dot com industry the dot com investment bubble burst, as the same year the channel would undergo its transformation into tech TV. Several months after, Vulcan Ventures had purchased the remaining ownership from zip Davis for somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred million dollars a princely Some keep in mind they had already spent another fifty million dollars just to get that first third

of the ownership. So it's a bit hard to remember exactly how big an impact this dot com bubble collapse had on the world in general and San Francisco in particular. During the boom years, San Francisco was doing incredibly well. The city was really turning around. There were all sorts of innovative startups and more than a few ventures built on little more than wishful thinking, and as we all know,

it wasn't something that would go on forever. The collapse hit those companies hard, and it also delivered a big blow to the advertising industry. Companies that had survived the dot com crash and the economic fallout that fought that went behind that were becoming much more careful with their money and they would spend less on advertising and marketing. So for a television channel that drew its revenue from selling ad space, this was really bad news and it

was a big ripple effects. So think of it like a bull's eye. Target at the very center of this bull's eye, we have the companies that went under when the dot com bubble collapsed around that the circle just outside of the core were the companies that survived. They had enough money, they were able to pivot, they were able to weather the storm, but they took a big hit further out from them, where companies like tech TV that depended upon these entities further inside the circles to survive,

they were getting ad revenue from those companies. Wasn't just tech TV, I mean, obviously websites were also deeply affected, including how Stuff Works. That one was really hit hard as well, when the advertising industry as a whole took a big step backward in the wake of the dot com collapse. To make things even more complicated, tech TV also had a large complementary web presence that ran in parallel with the television station. So the company had two

sets of staff. You had one on the table TV production side and you had one on the website development production side. And as the belts began to tighten in the wake of the dot com crash, it became clear that there just wasn't enough money to support everyone. Now, I'm sure many of you have been through a situation in which there was a major change of the company you worked for and you felt the effects of that ripple through the organization. That was definitely the case with

z d t V slash tech TV. Paul Allen had some ideas about programming, and one of those was that the channel should launch a television show dedicated to music called Audio File f I l E. Which had a higher budget than most of the other shows on the channel, including the two best performing shows on the channel, which were Called for Help and This Green Savers. So that

raised some hackles over at tech TV. You saw producers get a little upset when they saw how much money and care was being poured into this this pet project of Paul Allen's. And meanwhile, the shows that were consistently performing well with their audiences weren't getting much love from the executives. But the first really big change that would have a disastrous effect for the channel would start in two thousand one, and in March of two thousand one,

the company would have its first round of layoffs. Now this was a very small round of layoffs, but it was something that would set a tone for the next couple of years. They laid off about a dozen employees, so in the grand scheme of things, not a huge number of people. These were all employees who worked on the website side of the business. That also started to

build a further divide within the company. You had people who were working very hard on the website side to support the television shows and to build out more information about actual tech and they were seeing this start to transform where the focus, at least from the TV executive side, was more on pushing the channel toward an entertainment path rather than on the very tech focused path that was the original purpose of tech TV. This is also when tech TV would launch a nine and a half hour

block of programming called Tech Live. This was essentially a very long cable news show dedicated to all things tech, and it was largely geared towards business professionals like day traders, things like that investors, which was a tough sell in

those days. The behind the scenes leader for this show was Jim Lauderback, who had also served as host of Fresh Gear And in the interest of full disclosure, I used to work with Jim lauder Back, but briefly back How Stuff Works and Revision three were both part of Discovery Communications. We technically worked in the same departments, but our path didn't really cross that much, so I never really got much of a strong sense of of who

he is as a leader. But there were several problems that were later connected to this big push of tech Live. One of those was that it was really expensive and

the channel wasn't exactly a huge cash cow. According to a Wired magazine article from two thousand two, expenses included opening up news bureaus in Seattle, New York City, and Washington, d C. Also, they built out a broadcast center in the San Francisco headquarters, and meanwhile, the channel was still fighting to gain more purchase on cable networks, so recapturing

those costs was a big challenge. Another problem with tech Live was that the move began to alienate some of the channel's most faithful audience, so viewership number is actually went into decline. They were wanting to see the programs that they had loved from the very beginning of z d t V, and more of those were getting kind of pushed off to the side because of this enormous

block of programming with tech Live. Another issue was that it's really really hard to fill that many hours with content without retreading the same stuff on a regular basis, So within six months, executives decided to pair back tech Live into three separate programs. One was a ninety minute morning show, another was an hour long afternoon show, and

the third was a half hour nightly program. A former tech TV employee named Josh Green wrote a post on Leo Laporte's site, his blog site that laid out a bunch of complaints about tech TV around this time, and it's a heck of a read. Green is, let's say, acidic in his uh. In his criticism, he argued that the top leadership, both at the channel side of tech TV and the website side was unqualified. He even went

so far as to call them incompetent. He also argued that tech TV launched tech Live at precisely the worst time because it was the aftermath of the dot com bubble, so there was not a whole lot of consumer interest for technology in general, and certainly not a lot of enthusiasm about investing in tech companies mere months after the

entire market had had such a massive collapse. It does seem odd that a channel would pour resources into a huge commitment revolving around the tech financial industry when the desire to invest in that industry was less than ideal. Green's post again is really vitriolic, and that's an understatement. He clearly held a lot of contempt for many on the television side of tech TV. He also was a

little prophetic. He wrote in two thousand one that much of the content on the channel was being created for quote an audience of one end quote, and by that he meant that the creative decisions guiding the executives for creating programming for tech TV all seemed to be geared as an effort to please Paul Allen, because ultimately it was Alan who was kind of floating the company through the Vulcan Ventures investment firm, and Green stated correctly as

it would turn out that Alan would only do that for a certain amount of time before he would want to dump the venture, and it would take a couple of years. But that's pretty much what would happen. I'll explain more in just a moment, but first let's take another quick break. So something else that happened in two thousand one that would have a lot of consequences for not just tech TV, but obviously the entire world, where

the terrorist attacks on September eleven, two thousand one. It had repercussions around the world, and tech TV was not excluded. The channel would go dark for a couple of days. San Francisco was viewed as a possible target for further attacks, so much of the staff didn't come into work following September eleven. Also was a very tough psychological challenge for the writers and the hosts and the producers to produce

shows and talk about something that was seemingly inconsequential. Technology news and goofy gadgets just didn't seem important or valid in the wake of such an enormous tragedy. The tech industry as a whole, which was still unsteady after the dot com bust, was knocked off balance again, but the shows eventually started coming back. The channel came back with with new programming. People soldiered on, and then two months later a large round of layoffs would follow. It happened

on November six and one. The company let go of one hundred thirty employees. That was about twenty of the entire staff, according to Leo Report on his blog. This was around when tech Live was first cut back from its gargantuan nine and a half hours to three programs. The live programming in general shrank from eleven hours to six and a half hours a day. A half year later and the company did another round of layoffs. This time, it laid off about fifty people, and Tech Live shrank again.

At this point, it was just a half hour nightly program. Gone was the morning program, gone was the afternoon program, and most of the folks who were laid off had worked on the morning edition of the show. Both the Paul Allen Pet Project audio File and the opinion show Silicon Spin were canceled around this time as well. At this point, in the spring of two thousand two, there was a new push from the executives of tech TV. The goal was to transform the channel into a lifestyle channel.

This would mean less of an emphasis on the tech e stuff like you know, fewer talks about hard drives, fewer talks about ram. It was, fewer episodes or or or segments dedicated to helping people with computer problems. If you research tech TV, you'll likely come across many accounts that lament these changes, and in fact, a lot of people have posted about how upset they were leading up

to this point in the first place. Generally speaking, the original writers and hosts for shows on the network felt that it was kind of a mistake to move away from the core content the channel had been built around, and many of the more faithful viewers felt the same way.

Shows like Call for Help in the Screensavers remains some of the most popular programs on the channel, and advocates for those shows point to how those remained more anchored in the original philosophy of tech TV compared to programs that were either are changed dramatically or had been introduced later on. So people were saying, why do you keep changing away from your core focus when the shows that do best are the ones that are closest to that

core focus. Still, while people in the channel might have been upset at the time at those changes, the channel as a whole was starting to reach more households. Tech TV landed more carriage deals with cable companies and increased its range to somewhere between forty five and fifty seven million homes. The numbers for how large tech TVs reach was are kind of all over the place, but the range I encounter was essentially forty five to fifty seven

million households in America. It's made more complicated because Comcast, which had been carrying the channel in several markets, began to drop Tech TV from its lineup around two thousand one and two thousand two. More on that in just a second. The channel began to run more non original work, stuff that had been produced independently, such as reruns of old Max Headroom TV series and films like Forbidden Planet, an anime series from Japan. Some shows stuck around but

changed a bit in branding. What used to be called Game Spot TV would transform into Extended Play before then turning into the video game review series x Play, which was one of my favorite shows when I finally got a chance to watch some Tech TV programming, and one of just a couple of shows that would survive the

transition that would happen in two thousand four. It was back in two thousand three that x Play would pair the original host, Adam Sessler, who had been with the show since the beginning, back when it was Game Spot TV, with Morgan Webb, who had previously hosted the Screen Savers and Call for Help, and then they would take that show to new heights. So remember a minute ago when I mentioned that Comcast had been dropping tech TV from some of its markets. Well, here's where things get a

little juicy. Comcast had its own tech oriented cable channel called G four that was specifically focusing on video games and video game culture, but not many cable companies outside of Comcast would carry the channel. Danielle Levitas and an analyst at the time, estimated that tech TV reached probably about four times as many households as G four did, so in two thousand four, Comcast had a proposition, which

was to acquire tech TV. In fact, some people suggest that the real reason Comcast started dropping tech TV wasn't so much to eliminate the competition from its channel G four, but rather in an effort to perhaps decrease the value of tech TV because the company had anticipated making a move to acquire it a couple of years later. Well, anyway, by that time, Paul Allen must have been a bit disenchanted with his tech reented cable channel. Much of the

programming had failed to get a huge audience. Many who worked on the flagship shows were frustrated with changes in the company and seeing a lot of their coworkers let

go over the past year and a half. I'm not sure, it was an agonizing decision on Allen's part to agree with the sale, and it was set for an unreported sum, but most of the guests, as I saw, there were around three hundred million dollars, which means that Paul Allen would have seen a little bit of a loss because remember, the company originally spent almost three hundred sixty million dollars just buying you know, tech TV back when it was z d TV, let alone how much money they must

have poured into the channel to keep it floating over the following years. But the pitch was Comcast was going to merge tech TV with G four and there would be a brand new channel, G four tech TV, and it would combine the best of tech TVs programming with the best of G four's programming. It would also mean that anyone who wanted to continue their employment was going

to have to pick up stakes. Technically, what Comcast would do when they finally completed this merger was fire everybody at tech TV, but several of them would be offered the opportunity to take on a job at the new company, G four tech TV. The folks at G four, by the way, did not go through this process. This also would mean that you would have to move from San Francisco to Los Angeles, because that's where G four's headquarters were, and most of the tech TV staff really didn't have

that option. The new channel would cancel nearly all the shows produced by the older tech TV, and about two five people were fired when this merger process was completed. Shows that were canceled included a Call for Help, the show that was hosted by Leo Laporte. Laporte himself decided to leave the company he did not go with the

transformation for G four tech TV. He would get a chance to host Call for Help for G four tech TV Canada, but the American version of the channel would not carry the program, so he did continue to host the show for a while, but it wasn't shown in the US. In fact, it's actually more efficient for us to talk about the shows that successfully transferred over to G four tech TV rather than list out all the

ones that disappeared. Once G four merged with tech TV, the screen savers would make the transition, though after a short while it would get rebranded as a new show called Attack of the Show, and it would change significantly in the process. Anime Unleashed, which was a block of anime programming that I mentioned earlier that tech TV had added to the lineup in late two thousand to early two thousand three, That one made the transition over to

G four tech TV. That show would stick arounduntil two thousand six, and then it kind of quietly faded away. There was never any official notification of cancelation as far as I could tell, but it just got dropped from the lineup, possibly because of licensing expiration for the various anime programs that was showing, and it never came back.

The other show that made the transition was ex playing The Video Game Review Show, which is no big surprise since G four's whole identity was, at least in theory, wrapped up in the world of video games. Everything else pretty much got the ax once the move to Los Angeles was complete. The list of folks who worked at tech TV in its six years before being merged with G four is effectively a who's whose list of of technology, and not just in tech news. So I mentioned Leo

Laporte several times. He would later go on to create This Week in Tech or Twit, which is a phenomenally

successful tech news podcast Empire. John C. Dvorak, the host of The Silicon Spin Show, would become a frequent guest on Laport's shows, though the two had a bit of a public falling out in two thousand fifteen that eventually got patched up by Kevin Rose, another former tech TV producer and personality, would go on to found the Revision three network and be joined by several other former tech TV personalities and hosts and producers, and the website dig

was also founded by Kevin Rose. The Dig was essentially read it before there was read It, and then of course dig would sort of fall apart. That's another story for another day. Martin Sargent, who had worked as a segment producer on the Screen Savers, would go on to host or co host several other shows, both online video

and podcasts. Tom Merritt, who had worked as a producer on tech TV shows, would go on to join c Net, then he joined twit, and ultimately he would launch his own independent podcast, The Daily Tech News Show, and used the Patreon support model. He's brilliant and The Daily Tech News Show is a great show. He also tends to host about a billion other shows at any given time. Patrick Norton, who was co host of The Screensavers with Leolport, would join Revision three and he would co host a

show called tech Zilla with my buddy Shannon Morse. Roger Chang, who was also a producer over at tech TV, would similarly joined Revision three, and the list goes on and on. There was Becky Warley, who hosted The Screensavers for a while. She went on to become a tech contributor for Good

Morning America. Chris Parrello, who hosted Call for Help for a few years, would go on to do a lot of other web related endeavors, and some folks like Sarah Lane, Adam Sessler, Morgan Webb, and for a short while Kevin Rose would actually make the transition over to G four tech TV. Now our story doesn't really end here, even though tech Tv had essentially come to an end at

this point. In our next episode, I will talk about G four and how it was founded, so it will involve a little bit of backtracking, But then also what happened following this merger and the ultimate fate of both channels, which I'm sure most of you are aware of, is not a happy one. But that leads me to the end of this episode. If you guys have any suggestions, you can email me the addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com. You can drop me a line

on Facebook or Twitter. The handle of both of those is tech Stuff hs W. Head on over to our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. You can find an archive of all of our past episodes. There. You will also find a link to our online store, where every purchase you make goes to help the show. We greatly appreciate it, and I will talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is a production of I Heart

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