TechTV, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's experiment in technology entertainment, further floundered on Wednesday, with the company dismissing 50 employees and significantly trimming down TechLive, the tech-and-business news show that had once been touted as the "nucleus" of the channel's programming.
Sources close to the company -- including one who was previously laid off by the firm -- said that employees knew for a few days that the axe would be coming; TechTV is somewhat notorious for its leaks, with layoff notices always appearing on FuckedCompany before the company formally announces its plans.
Last November, TechTV laid off 130 workers. This latest round leaves the company with about 300 employees.
TechLive -- to which the channel had once devoted nine-and-a-half hours each day -- will be cut to a half-hour. In its place, TechTV will feature a coterie of quirky-sounding techy shows, including one featuring Max Headroom, that irritating digital talking head who has apparently made a comeback since he was last popular, in the late 1980s.
Other new TechTV shows will include Techno Games, which sounds similar to Robot Wars; Future Fighting Machines, a show about new military hardware; and Thunderbirds, a fantasy series that "inspires and ignites the imagination.
Also, the channel purchased the rights for three movies for showing on TechTV: one based on the Michael Chrichton novel Coma; Demon Seed, which is about a computer with "limitless intelligence"; and Forbidden Planet, which is about, one assumes, a rather grim place.
These movies will be shown "a lot," one TechTV exec said.
Last month, TechTV added Eye Drops, which features computer-animated short films, and The Tech Of..., a series about the technologies "behind the scenes of modern life."
Greg Drebin, TechTV's vice president for programming, said the new shows shift the channel from a news-and-info channel to one devoted to the "tech lifestyle."
He compared the new TechTV to Wired magazine, which looks at tech culture as much as it does new technology.
"This is about people who revel in technology," he said, "people who are proud of the fact that this is their passion."
The news that TechLive has been all-but-cancelled did not surprise some who were familiar with how the show was produced, or, in fact, how it was conceived.
TechTV pumped enormous resources into TechLive -- which might have seemed a good idea back in the late 1990s, an era of almost religious national devotion to all-things-tech. But TechLive was launched in April 2001, missing the zeitgeist by at least six months -- six months during which the Nasdaq, for instance, lost half its value.
Still, TechTV opened up three new bureaus -- in Seattle, New York and D.C. -- for TechLive, built a "fully digital, state-of-the-art San Francisco broadcast center," and devised an on-screen widget called the "Superticker," which gave "viewers up-to-the-minute status on the leading tech stocks, as well as additional data and interactive content." (It's unclear how TechTV's ticker differed from the tickers of all other news stations, or tickers available on the Web.)
But problems dogged the show from the start, according to insiders. One of the main debates concerned what could be called the "geek factor": There was a constant battle between people with a tech background and those with a TV background about how technically in-depth the show should get.
One of the other problems was that although TechTV now reaches almost 57 million viewers, only recently did it debut on cable systems in some of nation's most tech-obsessed areas. It was only made available to San Francisco viewers last November.
"They were branching out into these different countries," said one former employee who worked at the San Francisco office. "We have TechTV Canada -- but if you walked down the street and ask somebody about TechTV here, they won't know what you're talking about."
