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The G4 cable network is disappearing for good

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In recent news, it's reported that the G4 cable network is going off the air for good. I know, a cable network "going off the air" is as wrong as "dialing" a push button phone, But that's the headline of the article. Below is a short, "fair use" summary of the article:

Gaming-centric cable network G4 is being pulled for good, following a decision from NBCUniversal, IGN reports.

Cable providers still carrying the channel were sent a statement from NBCUniversal announcing the network will come to an end on Nov. 30. This follows earlier plans to rebrand G4 as the Esquire network, before it was launched on Style.

I doubt this news affects very many people, since it is being pulled for lack of viewers.
 
This was the channel that started its life as Tech TV back in the "gee whiz" days of the internet, right? I assume the "62 million households" cited in the story don't all watch the channel, although the article would lead one to believe that.
 
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No, G4 started as G4, but Comcast later bought TechTV (itself formerly ZDTV) and merged it with G4, renaming the network G4TechTV for a brief time, before dropping the TechTV name altogether and going back to G4.
 
"No one watches G4, let's rebrand it as Esquire Network."
"Wait, let's rebrand Style instead, that way we won't keep our number of networks targeting similar demographics the same."
"Great! But what about G4 now?"
"Eh, let's just let it wither away to nothing."

I keep going on about this (probably not here), but if you were going to shut down G4 anyway, why did you rebrand a different network as Esquire and lose an audience? Big companies almost never launch new national networks from scratch anymore, they just rebrand an old one, so why did you allow yourselves to lose a channel space?
 
The big reason for the switch to Style was because DirecTV wouldn't carry G4 on their systems after 2010 because of how badly the management bungled their ratings to become the second lowest-viewed rated network ahead of Fuel TV/Fox Sports 2. New management came into NBCU Cable over the summer 2014 and decided that killing G4 and sacrificing Style to establish Esquire was a better move than having Esquire launch on a channel space that had nothing attracting viewers except cheap/odd people who needed their Lost fix but didn't want to get Netflix, the 8 people who didn't get Spike TV for COPS, or fans of the same reruns of G4 programming over and over again. After the NBCU/Comcast merger, those two had way too many women's networks, so taking out one that had OK ratings was more sensible to convert to a men's channel than having it flop hard on the do-nothing G4 space.
 
To me, I think G4's days were numbered when it lost its DirecTV carriage, and then probably the final nail in its coffin was cancelling its flagship show, "Attack of the Show" (itself losing perhaps its star attraction, Olivia Munn, a few years before). Plus, I don't think NBCUniversal never all that much faith in G4 going forward.
 
blizzard59 said:
No, G4 started as G4, but Comcast later bought TechTV (itself formerly ZDTV) and merged it with G4, renaming the network G4TechTV for a brief time, before dropping the TechTV name altogether and going back to G4.
Click to expand...

That's correct. And G4 was a Comcast creation as well. Maybe Comcast should merge G4 into another channel to put it out of misery. Perhaps it could eliminate Oxygen next, until it totally eliminates it's entire cable division.

The odd part of G4 was that Echostar held a minority interest and Comcast and Echostar are direct competitors.
 
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Well, it's already December 1st and G4 is still active...at least on some cable systems.

I've checked G4tv.com and the website is still active with a slight update on its front page about the upcoming Syfy series Ascension which is premiering December 15. The website made no mention so far about the impending network shutdown.

Also, our cable company in my area, Service Electric, still carries G4 as part of their expanded digital tier lineup, according to Yahoo's TV listings.
 
And still active on AT&T U-Verse, resulting in another absurd edit war on Wikipedia about whether it's alive on not. I'm assuming that there's some sad cable/U-Verse bureaucrat that objected to NBCU pulling the plug and forced them to fulfill the contract.
 
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