TechTV

» see techtv.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

techtv was a us cable channel about computers. i was not in a position to receive it. cable in turkey carried cnn international and not much that was tech-shaped, and the channel did not run a satellite feed that reached ankara. the show clips reached me later, via real-media files passed around forums, watched in a window much smaller than the original broadcast.

the channel started as zdtv on may 11 1998. ziff-davis owned a magazine empire and wanted a cable property to go with it. the original lineup centered on a daily computer-help show called the screen savers, plus a how-to show called call for help. a news block called techlive filled out the rest of the schedule. leo laporte was on screen savers and call for help, with patrick norton co-hosting. they were doing the thing that the entire podcast industry would do twenty years later, on cable, with low ratings.

paul allen bought the channel from ziff-davis in 2000 and renamed it techtv. the format kept going for four more years under vulcan ventures. by 2003 it was reaching 43 million us households and had a 0.1 nielsen rating, which is what happens when you run a channel about being on the internet for an audience that is already on the internet. comcast bought the network in march 2004 for under three hundred million and merged it into g4 by the end of may. that is the date the brand died.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

the screen savers was the cult show. a daily live tech-help hour with two hosts and a phone bank, fielding calls from people whose dial-up modems were not working. it had a community feel that nothing else on cable had at the time. for a small slice of the us tech audience between 1998 and 2004 it was the closest thing to a daily companion show about being a computer person.

~ what it became ~

comcast did not want techtv. comcast wanted the carriage deals and the dual-channel slot. the merged g4techtv ran for less than a year before being rebranded as just g4 in february 2005, and the techtv shows were either cancelled or repurposed for a younger gamer demographic that did not particularly want a daily live computer-help hour. leo laporte left and started this week in tech, which became the model for every tech podcast that followed.

~ the long tail ~

the format outlived the cable channel by a wide margin. twit.tv carries the spiritual descendants of every techtv show, and the daily live tech program is now a youtube and twitch staple. the daily computer-help format became podcast standard along the way. what techtv was inventing in 1998 became the dominant medium of the 2010s and 2020s, just not on a coaxial cable.

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