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NBCU Names Adam Stotsky General Manager of G4

The first thing he needs to do is fix everything about the channel, which is among the bottom five in the Nielsen cable ratings. Outside of the 90 minutes of original studio programming every weeknight, Ninja Warrior and Bomb Patrol: Afghanistan, it is a complete mess of a network that still thinks it's 2005, Maxim is a relevant men's title and that should be their programming attitude.

The editorial staff of X-Play is one of the finest in gaming news and they're stuck in website and podcasting obscurity, while a Playmate (fine to look at, but I'm sure she doesn't even do a lick of research about the stories she reads) hosts the news recap on Attack of the Show. I watch only the 90 minutes of studio programming on G4, but otherwise the network has been irrelevant to me since the botched slash-and-burn of TechTV they pulled off (yes, so many people are still bitter about that years later).

The number they should be aiming at; 31,000. That was the number of viewers for the premiere of Proving Ground a few months ago, just before Ryan Dunn's death. No show on cable should have 31,000 or less viewers in primetime unless you have the words FSN prefixing your channel name on a non-game night, or are a shopping or religious network. That, along with what I mentioned above, was why UFC decided to just sign with Fox and try to rescue Fuel TV (which at least has a set programming mission in extreme sports) rather than buying G4 itself. And why DirecTV doesn't carry it any longer.
 
They can add reruns of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon from the night before. They have around the right target audience.
 
NBCU has some work to do on its cable channels. NBC Sports Channel, G4, and now Universal Sports.
 
Somewhere, Leo Laporte is swimming in his pool of gold coins and laughing about how a once informative and interesting channel he helped create and popularize has become less watchable than a PEG channel and even less viewers than C-SPAN2 on a weekend.
 
It would be best to shut down G4 rather than improve it, as it would always remind folks about the great service it destroyed through ownership change in order to gain more viewers and listeners. TechTV and G4 should have stayed separate and both would have succeeded if their owners had taken better care of them.

The only program I would watch regularly after G4 and TechTV became one programming service was "The Lab with Leo Laporte". After that program was removed from their schedule, I have not watched anything on their channel on purpose and I have desire to watch anything they provide. They lost their own purpose long ago based on what I read about their programming.

The TWIT Network, a live streaming service, would make a great cable TV and satellite TV programming service. It might not happen since more folks (excluding myself) have TV sets capable of accessing the video stream.
 
^The name stood for four generations of video games originally. It stood for text, sprites, polygons, and textures.
 
The problem is manifold:

-G4 flopped in two huge places in the last decade — in its hostile takeover of TechTV and in its attempted transition to a men's general entertainment network when they were too high on the dial to consider it. Since many of the viewers covered by the latter are still, as mentioned, bitter about the former, the channel needs to consider a total shutdown, new name, and focus.
-G4, because of its now-awkward name, has low recognition. It's not something connected to anything. In fact, I doubt the name is THAT copyrightable, either. It is in the Obscurity Tier of cable television. The original intent no longer fits the channel's current purpose.
-The young men's market to which G4 caters has been hard-hit economically the past few years. Even the brewing companies are finding that the higher unemployment rates mean lower beer sales.

G4 might be better served going back in time and becoming more like TechTV in terms of content — it's not a duplicated service on TV, unlike the Spike TV-clone that today's G4 is. However, since 2004, times have changed so drastically that that might not work as well as it had been in 2004.
 
If NBCUniversal/Comcast were smart enough, they'd sell G4 to WWE, which needs subscribers for its new cable channel scheduled to premiere--no fooling--on April 1, 2012, the same night as their big annual event, WrestleMania.
 
ansky212 said:
The first thing they need to do is get rid of the name "G4". What the heck is that supposed to mean anyway?
Click to expand...

At first it was meant to represent where gaming was at the time of the network's premiere (the fourth console generation), but even then it was confused by Mac's G4 Mac line. After the TechTV merger it became "girls, gadgets, gaming, and gigabytes" to fold in their four biggest niches.

How it's managed to hold onto a basic slot on Charter (besides goodwill from Paul Allen formerly owning Charter and TechTV is beyond me).

retrothoughts said:
If NBCUniversal/Comcast were smart enough, they'd sell G4 to WWE, which needs subscribers for its new cable channel scheduled to premiere--no fooling--on April 1, 2012, the same night as their big annual event, WrestleMania.
Click to expand...

They did try. UFC also tried. But they both walked away because of both the network's low ratings, terrible program flow, and of course, no DirecTV carriage. Also, WWE already gets Saturday night to itself on Universal HD, and I suspect that one's going to get a makeover soon because being the unofficial home of the network flops of the new millenium cannot be doing anything for their ratings at all.

Until they get the DirecTV situation fixed, there's no way someone else takes over G4. They're better off at this point pulling a LOGO (like when they launched under VH1 MegaHits's satellite space and carriage) and relaunching Chiller on there. The only program I would be sad to lose is "X-Play", and even that show could fold into a weekly timeslot on NBCSN somehow if NBC wanted to keep it with expansion of their web presence.
 
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