Recently G4TV revealed their lackluster "huge announcement" on their pop-culture program Attack Of The Show. The announcement was supposed to be made over a week ago but there was probably some legal issues involving the deal not being finalized or necessary papers not yet signed.

After a lot of internet speculation as to what this new addition that was going to "rock your world" was, it ended up being kind of a flop. Add to this the fact that NBC now offers streaming video on their website of all their shows for about a week and any value that might have existed is decreased tenfold.

I used to envy people who got TechTV back in the day. I had a New Jersey cable provider who didn't offer it and I'd always try to catch an episode when I was over a friend's house who had the channel. Even after getting a satellite provider who didn't have it I remember writing to DirectTV on their website requesting they add the channel to their lineup. They finally did, and years later after switching back to digital cable I've still got it.

After the huge merger of TechTV and G4 the channel has become a mere shadow of what it used to be. TechTV had a much broader audience and program-base than G4 will likely ever be. Although gaming and the culture associated with it has grown by leaps and bounds in the past two decades in the grand scheme of things it is still considered a "niche market." Investors, for sure, will always see G4TV not as a huge competitor to the "Big-Four" or "Large-Seven" networks and certainly not a technology-centered station. A look at their weekly lineup is more than enough to confirm that.

G4TV daily airs:

-About 5-6 episodes of X-Play (One new, one the others reruns)
-Attack Of The Show (Todays ep played about 3x a day
-Icons (Not a bad program but they need to do more)
-Cinematech

Weekends consist of a large portion of that previous weeks shows played in a marathon. The rest is filled with either Japanese crazy game shows, Star Trek, The Man Show or late night infomercials. (Ron Popeill anyone?) To be honest for G4TV to REALLY survive they need to start hiring more people and creating more shows, not cut staff like they did after the merger.

That's right, I said it.

While I enjoy both AOTS and X-Play, (and Icons even has some shining episodes), there just simply isn't enough content for a full fledged television network. While many speculated online that the big announcement was a move to HD broadcasting I felt skeptical as there wasn't enough material to warrant this. All their shows could easily be video podcasts or streamed online.

So how do you fix a broken G4? My thoughts would be to add more shows. They've got a pop-culture show, almost like a televised Digg in AOTS. X-Play has videogame reviews covered. Why not bring back shows like Anime Unleashed, Beyond Tomorrow, Digital Avenue, Nerd Nation, Robot Wars the Screensavers and TechTV News? G4 would thrive on new shows and content as opposed to filling the empty space with reruns. Why not put some of the great relationships they've got going with Digg, BoingBoing.net, Destructoid and others to create some new great shows? Code Monkeys is a new and hilarious program basically in the format of 8-bit NES art. Why not try getting the rights to Red vs. Blue? Machinima is a huge untapped market in my opinion for G4.

Cheat always seemed like kind of a useless program to me. Instead of encouraging cheating why not have a strategy-based show, that helps gamers improve their skills instead of spoon-feeding them things they could find on GameFAQs.

What do you think? How could G4 improve, what would you like to see most and what shows do you miss most from TechTV?