I commented a few times about the merger of TechTV and G4TV and how it ruined a reasonably entertaining and informative show (The Screensavers), as well as most anything else good on the techtv channel – only X-Play has come through largely unscathed. Not that there was much else on techtv worth watching, but anyway, stated plainly, the G4 folks suck, they seem to have no idea what they’re doing. How these people manage to be in charge of running a television network I don’t know. Anyway, a cool observation – the core of the screensaver show, Patrick and Leo, are back together along with Yoshi, Robert Heron and Kevin Rose over at thisweekintech.com, where they’re offering up a podcast. They’re using skype, RSS and bit torrent to push their stuff out to the community, along with weblogs to help publicize and talk about it. This is well worth checking out, and if you were a fan of the old screensavers, it’s a must. This is also a hint of things to come in terms of niche content publishing. This stuff wasn’t enough to sustain a tv network, we’ll see if it’s enough to sustain their hosting and bandwidth bills and pay their rent. A telling clue is that Kevin Rose announced that quit Attack of the Show (what techtv’s screensavers evolved into) effective this friday in order to focus on his internet publishing stuff, which includes thisweekintech.com as well as systm.org, a new show (video, again RSS/torrent stuff) that he’s putting together, as well as a few other projects. The same is true of a lot of the former techtv folk, a lot of both on and off air people seem to be involved in a set of ‘new distribution model’ projects.

Wouldn’t it be interesting in a year or two if it turns out the former techtv folk are able to effectively put themselves back on the air using this stuff? It’s not mass market yet by any stretch, but is it a sustainable vertical niche market? Can they get this stuff to the point where they’re pulling in the numbers equivalent to what they were when they were a cable show? Even if they can only get a fraction of that market, the larger, more precise dataset they’ll have about their viewers as compared to what they can get from broadcast tv should be worth more to their advertising clients. I have no idea how the economics of this would work but it’s all fascinating to see. And not to get to far down the rabbit hole, but the next generation consoles, particularly the xbox 360, have a potential role to play here as well.