Goodbye TechTV, Hello Podcasts

I used to spend 5 hours of my time a week (ok more like 3.5 hours after Tivo'ing through the ads) watching The Screensavers on TechTV. Back in the day with Patrick Norton and Leo Laoporte hosting the show there was a great mix of humor and tech that satisfied my inner geek.

Things started to go wrong when Patrick and Leo left the show and then Paul Allen sold TechTV to Comcast's G4.

G4 is a games network, and boy did it show, the content of the flagship Screensavers show veered towards the youthful games player and other non-tech content began to creep in.

They recently did a facelift on the show, took it off for a few weeks, sacked a bunch of people and brought in some new faces. It didn't help - the content still sucked. The G4 message boards were filled with complaints about the new format and new hosts and a lot of the complaints were against the big Comcast/G4 management.

Now I don't know why G4 bought TechTV because it seems they didn't like any of the shows having changed or cut most of them. So I have decided to utilize my executive privelege and just stop watching it.

I now get my tech fix from the variety of podcasts I listen to, such as Engadget, and at least I know the content of these podcasts will not change on the whim of big corporate management. Of course it could change on the whim of the individual podcaster, but I am more comfortable with that.

Mr Ballmer - People in Glasshouses ...

When Steve Ballmer said "The most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen'" he should think about how the music gets on the iPod in the first place. There are a lot of copies of iTunes for Windows out there and songs have to be downloaded to iTunes before they can be loaded on an iPod.

He also fails to acknowledge the millions more songs being downloaded illegally to Windows PCs that don't end up on an iPod (or other MP3 player)- the users either listen to them on their PC or burn a CD.