G4 cancels both X-Play and Attack of the Show

[ryan123450]

I'll admit that I love the idea of what G4 could be far more than I like the channel as it is. Hopefully the rebranded channel with be far better.

 

[Owain Taggart]

I spent a little time over the last few days looking at G4 now and then just out of curiosity.

What an odd channel. I guess the idea of the channel is to cater to young, tech savvy people. But they only have two shows that have any focus on that at all, AOTS and XPlay.

Then they have a lot of shows that don't really seem to cater to a young demo at all. Quantum Leap and Cops seem to be on a lot. Are teens and 20s age range interested in that? With campus cops, are college kids interested in seeing their peers arrested?

Yeah, definitely an odd channel now, but it's mostly a skeleton of what it used to be. It had a lot of good stuff on there at the time, where now it's mostly filler. The problem is when they merged. G4 and TechTV had completely different demographics, to the point that they were incompatible with each other, and I don't see how it could have worked. The start of the merger was more promising than what it ended up being, as The Screensavers was still on the air, but then they cancelled that and rebranded it as AOTS, and the tone was completely different and more in your face.

The only sweetspot in all of that is that in Canada, we were getting a new version of Call for Help, and then The Lab with Leo, which they didn't bother showing in the U.S version of the channel, so it offset the sour taste of AOTS.

 

[The Grim Ghost]

I spent a little time over the last few days looking at G4 now and then just out of curiosity.

What an odd channel. I guess the idea of the channel is to cater to young, tech savvy people. But they only have two shows that have any focus on that at all, AOTS and XPlay.

Then they have a lot of shows that don't really seem to cater to a young demo at all. Quantum Leap and Cops seem to be on a lot. Are teens and 20s age range interested in that? With campus cops, are college kids interested in seeing their peers arrested?

Yeah, definitely an odd channel now, but it's mostly a skeleton of what it used to be. It had a lot of good stuff on there at the time, where now it's mostly filler. The problem is when they merged. G4 and TechTV had completely different demographics, to the point that they were incompatible with each other, and I don't see how it could have worked. The start of the merger was more promising than what it ended up being, as The Screensavers was still on the air, but then they cancelled that and rebranded it as AOTS, and the tone was completely different and more in your face.

The only sweetspot in all of that is that in Canada, we were getting a new version of Call for Help, and then The Lab with Leo, which they didn't bother showing in the U.S version of the channel, so it offset the sour taste of AOTS.

I think a big problem with the idea is that most young people probably don't watch a lot of TV anymore. A lot of the younger people I know don't have cable, they watch their favorite shows through netflix or hulu. And if they are interested in getting tech news, video game reviews, etc.. they are getting them from blogs and specific websites that do a much better job covering this stuff than g4 ever could.

 

[Random_Spock]

@ The Grim Ghost: Only watched G4 for the Quantum Leap reruns and now those have seemed to be replaced by Knight Rider ones.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I stopped caring about G4 when TechTV merged with G4 and they dropped Thunderbirds reruns. I cheered inside when my cable provider dropped it from basic programming to make room for a blank channel.

 

[Owain Taggart]

I think a big problem with the idea is that most young people probably don't watch a lot of TV anymore. A lot of the younger people I know don't have cable, they watch their favorite shows through netflix or hulu. And if they are interested in getting tech news, video game reviews, etc.. they are getting them from blogs and specific websites that do a much better job covering this stuff than g4 ever could.

Yeah, the market is definitely different now than when the channel first started. Youtube and blogs didn't exist back then