October 2, 2019 • 44 mins
A TV and movie producer thought that he could do for video games what MTV did for music videos. But the G4 channel would end up alienating the very viewers it sought to attract.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
I Heart Radio and How Stuff Works and Love of
all Things Tech. And this is the second episode I'm
devoting to a pair of tech related television channels that
(00:27):
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.
(00:52):
That tech channel was called G four TV, which was
a television channel marketed towards gamers. For a bit longer
than a day, cade 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,
(01:16):
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
(01:37):
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.
(01:58):
He worked for a short aisle 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
(02:21):
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.
(02:44):
M 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 is not the most reliable of sources. Her Shorn
(03:05):
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,
(03:29):
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.
(03:51):
Hershorn 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 Kerry, Jimmie Fox,
and Jennifer Lopez, 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
(04:13):
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
(04:34):
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
(04:59):
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
(05:20):
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
(05:43):
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 bellious edge,
you know, in a very corporate calculated way. Now, to
(06:05):
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
(06:27):
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 tried to expand it
beyond that, your connection would just chug along and you'd
be buffering the entire time. Pseudo would go out of
(06:49):
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
(07:10):
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
(07:31):
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
(07:52):
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 games, 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.
(08:16):
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 Advanced, 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
(08:37):
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 grab something with the
(08:58):
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
(09:21):
known as the 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
(09:43):
games for the Dreamcast outside of Japan. Uh Japan Dreamcast
games would keep on going till about two thousand 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. That chief operating
Officer or c OO was Deborah Green, who had previously
(10:05):
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 there might be a good idea
(10:26):
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
(10:49):
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 around thirty
to forty million households total, and the prime demographic, as
I mentioned earlier, was eighteen to thirty four year old men.
(11:12):
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
(11:33):
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
(11:56):
folks at G four Media, you know, some of the
people in charge shared some of those perceptions about video
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,
(12:16):
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
(12:38):
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
(13:01):
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
(13:24):
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 thousand two that Comcast
was going to launch a video game centric channel later
that year. As far as I could tell, this was
(13:44):
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
the fledgling channel enough of a head start to land
some good advertising deals for its programming. An article in
(14:08):
sf Gate that published one month after the channel actually
went live, which was in April two thou too, 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
(14:29):
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
(14:51):
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,
(15:17):
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
(15:41):
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.
(16:01):
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
(16:24):
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
(16:46):
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. Send the Tech was a bit of an
odd program. It was a thirty minute block of programming
that was really just video game play footage and video
(17:07):
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
(17:27):
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
(17:48):
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 Day, 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
(18:11):
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
(18:31):
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
(18:54):
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 of 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
(19:16):
better than expected end 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,
(19:38):
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 expect did comment might have
(20:01):
been a bit disingenuous. 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.
(20:22):
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
(20:46):
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
(21:08):
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
(21:31):
two was super hard for many reasons, some of which
I touched on in Detech 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 tho one, meant that a lot of companies were
cutting way back on advertising and marketing budgets, so there
(21:53):
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, were 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
(22:14):
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
(22:35):
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
(22:56):
similar price, because no one can ask for very highs
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 in turn meant that the channel
was hustling a lot to meet revenue goals. The company
(23:18):
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
(23:40):
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 depending upon Comcast as a
(24:01):
cable carrier, and because Comcast itself had a limited number
of subscribers, it wasn't likely to reach that goal. But
it's still the channenge just kept plugging along, and besides,
the channel still had a few years to go before
it had to break even on that one million dollars
that Comcast had floated at launch. And keep in mind,
I'm talking about households that could potentially watch this channel.
(24:24):
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
(24:46):
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.
(25:11):
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
(25:32):
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
(25:55):
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
(26:18):
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. They ended up being Dante from Devil
May Cry two or Hottest Character Tina Armstrong in Dead
(26:40):
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 mosts written by women
(27:01):
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
(27:25):
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
(27:47):
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
(28:09):
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,
(28:32):
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
there 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
(28:52):
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
(29:13):
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
(29:35):
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 lineup, 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 MA two
(30:00):
thousand four as G four tech TV, 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
(30:22):
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
(30:44):
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
(31:06):
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
(31:28):
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 o gool 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
(31:51):
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
(32:15):
February fift 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
(32:35):
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
(32:56):
turning it more into a lifestyle channel aimed at men,
not two different from what Spike TV 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
(33:18):
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,
(33:40):
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 Screensavers all left to
(34:01):
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,
(34:21):
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,
(34:43):
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 East with the actress Olivia Munn, who would go
on to become one of the biggest stars to really
(35:05):
first make her name at G four. Oh and and
this is no shade on miss 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. Olivia mun was hands down the best choice.
G four made the right call on that one. By
two thousand and six, the only original G four show
(35:27):
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 are
probably some licensing fees that had to be paid, but
(35:48):
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, and
two thousand seven the channel didn't look anything like its
original incarnation. Pereira and Munn continued to host attack of
the show, and Pereira was really the only link back
(36:09):
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.
(36:29):
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
(36:50):
from the tech TV days that had not really been
tampered with that much was ex Play, and even that
one got a little wackier over time. The little bit
of lip 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,
(37:11):
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
(37:34):
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 continue to pour money into licensing
deals so that the channel could run reruns of other
(37:55):
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
(38:16):
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, both of
those shows came out of or grew out of the
(38:37):
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,
(38:59):
Direct TV dumped G four. This 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
(39:21):
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 on screen chemistry with Pereira was one of
the big reasons Attack of the Show was doing so well.
(39:44):
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 eleven. In
early Neil Tynes would step down as president of the channel,
(40:09):
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
(40:32):
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
(40:54):
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
(41:18):
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
(41:39):
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
(42:01):
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 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
(42:22):
four was supposed to turn into. Now, there's a lot
more that could 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
(42:44):
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 personally
think growth on its own is not the best measure
(43:06):
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
(43:29):
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. If you guys
(43:52):
have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, send
me a note. Let me know. The email is tech
stuff at how stuff works dot com, where you can
reach out on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both
of those is text stuff hs W. Don't forget to
go to our website that's text stuff podcast dot com.
You'll find an archive of all of our past episodes there,
plus links to our online store, where every purchase you
(44:15):
make goes to help the show. We greatly appreciate it,
and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff
is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
I Heart Radio and How Stuff Works and Love of
all Things Tech. And this is the second episode I'm
devoting to a pair of tech related television channels that
(00:27):
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.
(00:52):
That tech channel was called G four TV, which was
a television channel marketed towards gamers. For a bit longer
than a day, cade 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,
(01:16):
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
(01:37):
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.
(01:58):
He worked for a short aisle 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
(02:21):
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.
(02:44):
M 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 is not the most reliable of sources. Her Shorn
(03:05):
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,
(03:29):
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.
(03:51):
Hershorn 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 Kerry, Jimmie Fox,
and Jennifer Lopez, 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
(04:13):
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
(04:34):
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
(04:59):
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
(05:20):
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
(05:43):
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 bellious edge,
you know, in a very corporate calculated way. Now, to
(06:05):
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
(06:27):
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 tried to expand it
beyond that, your connection would just chug along and you'd
be buffering the entire time. Pseudo would go out of
(06:49):
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
(07:10):
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
(07:31):
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
(07:52):
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 games, 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.
(08:16):
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 Advanced, 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
(08:37):
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 grab something with the
(08:58):
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
(09:21):
known as the 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
(09:43):
games for the Dreamcast outside of Japan. Uh Japan Dreamcast
games would keep on going till about two thousand 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. That chief operating
Officer or c OO was Deborah Green, who had previously
(10:05):
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 there might be a good idea
(10:26):
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
(10:49):
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 around thirty
to forty million households total, and the prime demographic, as
I mentioned earlier, was eighteen to thirty four year old men.
(11:12):
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
(11:33):
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
(11:56):
folks at G four Media, you know, some of the
people in charge shared some of those perceptions about video
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,
(12:16):
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
(12:38):
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
(13:01):
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
(13:24):
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 thousand two that Comcast
was going to launch a video game centric channel later
that year. As far as I could tell, this was
(13:44):
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
the fledgling channel enough of a head start to land
some good advertising deals for its programming. An article in
(14:08):
sf Gate that published one month after the channel actually
went live, which was in April two thou too, 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
(14:29):
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
(14:51):
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,
(15:17):
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
(15:41):
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.
(16:01):
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
(16:24):
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
(16:46):
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. Send the Tech was a bit of an
odd program. It was a thirty minute block of programming
that was really just video game play footage and video
(17:07):
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
(17:27):
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
(17:48):
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 Day, 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
(18:11):
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
(18:31):
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
(18:54):
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 of 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
(19:16):
better than expected end 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,
(19:38):
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 expect did comment might have
(20:01):
been a bit disingenuous. 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.
(20:22):
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
(20:46):
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
(21:08):
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
(21:31):
two was super hard for many reasons, some of which
I touched on in Detech 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 tho one, meant that a lot of companies were
cutting way back on advertising and marketing budgets, so there
(21:53):
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, were 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
(22:14):
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
(22:35):
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
(22:56):
similar price, because no one can ask for very highs
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 in turn meant that the channel
was hustling a lot to meet revenue goals. The company
(23:18):
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
(23:40):
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 depending upon Comcast as a
(24:01):
cable carrier, and because Comcast itself had a limited number
of subscribers, it wasn't likely to reach that goal. But
it's still the channenge just kept plugging along, and besides,
the channel still had a few years to go before
it had to break even on that one million dollars
that Comcast had floated at launch. And keep in mind,
I'm talking about households that could potentially watch this channel.
(24:24):
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
(24:46):
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.
(25:11):
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
(25:32):
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
(25:55):
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
(26:18):
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. They ended up being Dante from Devil
May Cry two or Hottest Character Tina Armstrong in Dead
(26:40):
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 mosts written by women
(27:01):
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
(27:25):
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
(27:47):
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
(28:09):
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,
(28:32):
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
there 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
(28:52):
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
(29:13):
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
(29:35):
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 lineup, 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 MA two
(30:00):
thousand four as G four tech TV, 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
(30:22):
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
(30:44):
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
(31:06):
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
(31:28):
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 o gool 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
(31:51):
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
(32:15):
February fift 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
(32:35):
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
(32:56):
turning it more into a lifestyle channel aimed at men,
not two different from what Spike TV 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
(33:18):
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,
(33:40):
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 Screensavers all left to
(34:01):
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,
(34:21):
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,
(34:43):
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 East with the actress Olivia Munn, who would go
on to become one of the biggest stars to really
(35:05):
first make her name at G four. Oh and and
this is no shade on miss 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. Olivia mun was hands down the best choice.
G four made the right call on that one. By
two thousand and six, the only original G four show
(35:27):
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 are
probably some licensing fees that had to be paid, but
(35:48):
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, and
two thousand seven the channel didn't look anything like its
original incarnation. Pereira and Munn continued to host attack of
the show, and Pereira was really the only link back
(36:09):
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.
(36:29):
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
(36:50):
from the tech TV days that had not really been
tampered with that much was ex Play, and even that
one got a little wackier over time. The little bit
of lip 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,
(37:11):
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
(37:34):
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 continue to pour money into licensing
deals so that the channel could run reruns of other
(37:55):
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
(38:16):
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, both of
those shows came out of or grew out of the
(38:37):
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,
(38:59):
Direct TV dumped G four. This 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
(39:21):
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 on screen chemistry with Pereira was one of
the big reasons Attack of the Show was doing so well.
(39:44):
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 eleven. In
early Neil Tynes would step down as president of the channel,
(40:09):
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
(40:32):
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
(40:54):
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
(41:18):
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
(41:39):
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
(42:01):
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 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
(42:22):
four was supposed to turn into. Now, there's a lot
more that could 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
(42:44):
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 personally
think growth on its own is not the best measure
(43:06):
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
(43:29):
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. If you guys
(43:52):
have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, send
me a note. Let me know. The email is tech
stuff at how stuff works dot com, where you can
reach out on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both
of those is text stuff hs W. Don't forget to
go to our website that's text stuff podcast dot com.
You'll find an archive of all of our past episodes there,
plus links to our online store, where every purchase you
(44:15):
make goes to help the show. We greatly appreciate it,
and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff
is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
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