Saturday, May 22, 2004

Swallowed up Not to self-promote too much, but it occurred to me while writing earlier that my involvement with TechTV actually goes farther back than my employment with the channel. About five and a half years ago, I reported on ZDTV (the station's former name) for Wired: "You-Gotta-Be-Kidding TV." It was my first assignment after I left the magazine to try my hand at freelancing and my first long feature ever. It's pleasing to read now; I think it's held up pretty well. One small personal irony is that now I'm going back to freelancing, at least for the time being (I don't anticipate doing a story on the channel now, though). A larger irony is that, through a history that involved ownership and management changes and a couple huge shifts in programming philosophy, ZDTV/TechTV met the big challenges I wrote about. It kept expanding its reach, building an audience (a small but growing one), and establishing an ad base that was far richer than what even the CEO anticipated when I interviewed him (the big win there was to get past the reliance on tech-related advertising and bring in consumer companies, like carmakers; in fact, it's similar to the ad mix that made Wired a publishing phenomenon. But despite the success, the channel is history. On one level, the swallowing up of TechTV is just the way business goes. An early analysis of the sale called it "a teardown": Comcast was buying the property to knock down the house (our programming, staff, and other assets), keep the real estate (our access to 43 million homes) and put up something new there (its G4 game channel, which has reportedly run through a big pile of money and has just 13 million or so households). Fine, it's their dough, and you can play that way if you ante up. That doesn't mean it's a smart play, though you can't really blame the buyers. The perverse part is the fact the former owner sold the property without any apparent concern whether it would be torn down or not. All you people who've worked to build this into something -- get moving, because the building's coming down. 2:01:09 PM    comment []

Another goodbye to TechTV Surely you recall the lovely parting gift we received from TechTV the day after our layoff was announced. Well, someone had a different idea about what to do with it. Very Letterman-esque. 1:19:53 PM    comment []

TechLive: That's a wrap Last night was our last show. Odd to say it, given all the complaining I've done at work and away from work about wanting the show to be better, the stories to be better, everything to be better; and odd to say given all my doubts about whether what I was, we were, doing was meaningful at such a dark time in our world and our history; but: yes, I'm sad to see it end and to have my connection to a pretty great group of workmates severed. I was there three years, four months, and two days (not that anyone's counting, and I still have to go in Monday for the final handshake and to turn in my laptop and keys and such). Anyway, the picture is a screen capture I ripped off a bulletin board on TechTV help guru Leo Laporte's site. I'm there somewhere in the back. 1:13:01 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Dan Brekke.