The Lab with Leo Laporte starts taping in Vancouver today. 15 shows are being taped from now till Friday and you can catch a shot of the studio webcam at labwithleo.com during taping. The first show will air on G4 TechTV on April 22/07 as a replacement to Call For Help which concluded in January.
The Lab with Leo Laporte broadcast schedule now includes the following City-TV schedule:
City-TV Winnipeg, Sundays at 8am; City-TV Toronto, Sundays at 7am; City-TV Calgary, Saturdays at 6pm; City-TV Edmonton, Saturdays at 6pm; and City-TV Vancouver Saturdays at 6pm and also weekdays at 2pm.
Can't say I am surprised. It was a lifeless show other than Leo. Some of the guests were good but I think it got way too 'geeky" for the casual viewer with an interest in technology. I enjoyed the phone-in section of the show where Leo really shines with his unique personality and knowledge.
The cast other than Leo were really weak. I don't expect a group of thespians but most of them were so wooden on camera you could harvest them for planking.
Hope he tries again..maybe someone in the USA will give him another shot. He's worth watching in the right environment.
I had a feeling something might happen. I saw online that Australia's "How To" channel had dropped the show as of this week. With three core members leaving last month, I guess it gave them a chance to think about whether to continue the show.
It is rather surprising though since it was one of the core programs on G4TechTV. If they don't find some good content, that network will be dead.
The Lab.. didn't air in the US so it wasn't core to the channel. It was good filler when G4TechTV US played content that couldn't be aired here in Canada. I suppose now it will just be more re-runs for us.
rocket9, I thought it wasn't geeky enough most of the time. Guess that just shows that there is an audience for both types of presentation.
I'm not very happy with TechTV in general. I'd like to see a REAL tech channel that is aimed at adults and serious teens who want to learn about technology, not watch reviews of videogames. A fulltime channel with that focus should have enough air time for shows aimed at both the beginner and the more advanced viewers.
The Lab was so much slower and honestly a lot lamer then the Screen savers or call for help.
Not surprised to see it go.
I didn't find the answers from phone questions were answered that well. The crew that was with Leo had no on camera personality.
I love Leo. His personality was great and he had the persona like you know him. It was slow yes but he was quite smart especially in the world of apple.
I subscribed to TechTV - before it was G4TechTV because of Leo Laporte and the original Call For Help and The Screen Savers. Then they sold the American station to G4 and it became so thoroughly awful as to become unwatchable. Now the American channel has pretty much dumped technology programming except for Attack of the Show and XPlay, but G4TechTV in Canada still has a mandate to do tech programming. Bringing Leo north first for the revived Call For Help and then for The Lab with Leo were Canadian content but also maintained the core mandate of the channel.
If there was a fault that you could find with The Lab with Leo it is that the show wasn't live to air - couldn't be really unless Leo wanted to move his life to Toronto or Vancouver from the San Francisco area, and who would want to do that? If I'm a caller I want my question answered right now, not in a couple of months when the show airs. That lack of immediacy hurt them in other ways as well. It's hard to talk about the latest software when it debuts a week after the last taping and the next taping sequence won't air for at least another month.
Still I will miss Leo and the show. I just hope that Rogers (and Shaw, the other Canadian partner in the channel) are able, and (more importantly) willing to come up with a Canadian show to take its place. Otherwise they may have one less subscriber.
I am very disapointed in G4techtv's programming, the only show I really liked was this show because it was aimed towards technology and not video games like the other 90% of there programming is. Now the lineup is going to be just re-runs and re-runs. There's hardly any content at all on that channel anymore. They better shape up or I have a feeling the whole channel is going to crash into the ground
I think the end of "The Lab" pretty much means they have decided to abandon the channel. I would not be surprised to see the channel sold to Corus or some other media outlet. Most tech savvy users find their info online and most other people just don't give tech TV programs a chance. Of course, it is not easy to find anything on the channel anyway.
Not surprising. I really miss the old Tech TV shows like Screensavers and Call for Help. But the fact that these shows were cancelled so long ago shows how the popularity of an all out "tech channel" simply isn't there and that keeping such a channel on the air isn't financially viable.
Leo has said that they plan to re-run The Lab episodes until the end of 2009 at least. So they'll have almost 2 years before they need to look for a replacement. From now until then, they'll have no cost to run the show but I'm sure the commercials will bring less and less money as the audience drops due to the stale content.
Why would you think that Rogers would definitely not sell it? Unless the channel is making lots of money, most companies dump what does not do well for them. Look at CTVglobemedia selling "CLT" last week.
Leo has said that they plan to re-run The Lab episodes until the end of 2009 at least. So they'll have almost 2 years before they need to look for a replacement. From now until then, they'll have no cost to run the show but I'm sure the commercials will bring less and less money as the audience drops due to the stale content.
Why would you think that Rogers would definitely not sell it? Unless the channel is making lots of money, most companies dump what does not do well for them. Look at CTVglobemedia selling "CLT" last week.
I dropped G4 in January, when CITY started to air the program. I record "fresh" episodes during the week on CITY Vancouver at 2pm EDT.
Apparently, Leo's content coordinator quit late last year and he has had to do most of the work himself. It shows. Where did Steve Gibson and all the other savy guests go? The content became so shallow and irrelevant that I fast forwarded through most of the guest segments. Pity.
Then again, it will be interesting to see what Leo can come up with at TWIT and CommandN is still going strong.
If you are looking for a replacement fix, try watching "Click" from BBCWorld. It is one tech news program that continues to improve even though it has been a fixture at BBC for quite some time. It is also available online weekly from here:
I am saddened but not surprised. None of the TV networks seem to know how to run with this kind of content.
And as for those that feel that there is no market for it...
Every single person from the TechTV world has gone on to create content that now EASILY has viewership/readership/listenership well in excess of what the viewership on TechTV was.
Here is a short list of the spinoff result of the TechTV shutdown 3+ years ago:
@jbracing24 - commandN has nothing to do with Leo. It was started by Amber Mac, her brother Jeff, Mike Lazazzera (who used to be on Call For Help) and myself. Leo has appeared on a few ep's but that is it.
I still think that Television just is not the best media source for this type of content. As a previous poster said, most technophiles will get the info they need from the net.
Although this show wasn't that much different from Call for Help, for me it definitely was not as good. I too found that I fast forwarded through a lot of the show, probably watching the entire episode in 10 to 15 minutes. I almost never fast forwarded through Call for Help.
I won't really miss it. I find Leo has become a lot like Bob Vila was on this Old house, always trying to show how much he knew, interrupting the guest constantly, and not letting them finish what they were talking about.
I can see how that would be a put off for some. However, having been in the IT industry for nearly 15 years, I can say that there are certainly times when the caller (USER) needs to be cut off as everything they are about to say can be easily predicted. And where Leo has been in the industry way longer than I, it only makes sense that he is even more attuned to these things.
For instance, last year on his radio show, someone called in convinced they had a Firewire 800 device and was connecting it to a Firewire 400 camera. Anyone who knows firewire also knows that the connectors are quite different and that you need an adapter cable to go between 400 and 800. He had to cut the caller off because he would not leave it alone.
As for Bob, he can probably hammer better than I can but he is far more a TV personality and Sears spokesman than he ever was a carpenter/contractor. His formal education is actually in journalism.
I should say that the only thing about Leo that bugs me is his predisposition to ALWAYS offer up the Mac as the "end-all, be-all" solution to all things home computing.
That always bugged me as well. They are very good machines, but the reality is that Macs comprise approx. 5% of the computer world, and CFH probably took up about 25% of the Computer segments with Mac stuff.
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