How Ziff-Davis turned a magazine empire into a cable channel
By the late 1990s Ziff-Davis published PC Magazine, Computer Shopper and MacUser, and it had the one thing a new cable network needs: readers who already trusted the name.
ZDTV went live on May 11, 1998, from a studio in San Francisco, picked for its short drive to Silicon Valley. The launch was tiny. The channel appeared on cable systems in Las Vegas, Detroit, parts of Georgia near Atlanta and parts of Maine, and most of the country could not find it on the dial at all.
The programming idea was literal. Take the magazines and put them on television. Reviews of new hardware, news about Microsoft and Apple, coverage of internet culture, and a live nightly call-in show where two hosts walked a stranger through reformatting a Windows 98 machine on the air.
Money arrived quickly. Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures paid $54 million for a 33 percent stake in November 1998, then bought out Ziff-Davis entirely, paying $204.8 million for the remaining 64 percent in a deal that closed on January 21, 2000. Later that year the channel dropped the ZDTV name and became TechTV.
What made The Screen Savers different from everything else on cable
The Screen Savers premiered on the channel's first day, May 11, 1998, hosted by Leo Laporte and Kate Botello. Laporte had spent the early 1990s doing tech radio in the Bay Area. Botello asked the questions the audience at home was actually thinking.
The show was live, two hours a night, which almost nothing else on basic cable was by 1998. Viewers called in with a dead hard drive or a browser that opened somewhere new every morning because they had installed BonziBuddy, and the hosts fixed it on the air with whatever hardware was on the desk.
Patrick Norton later took the second chair, and the Laporte and Norton pairing is the version most viewers remember. Around them rotated a bench of producers and contributors who became names in their own right, among them Kevin Rose and Megan Morrone.
That structure is what the channel sold. It was technical without being cold, and patient with people who did not know what an IRQ was. By 2004 TechTV reached about 43 million US homes, a real number for a niche channel, though its ratings stayed small and its carriage deals were a fight.
What did Comcast pay for TechTV in 2004?
Comcast announced the purchase on March 25, 2004 and closed it on May 10, 2004, buying all outstanding common and preferred stock of TechTV from Vulcan Programming for approximately $300 million in cash. The plan was to fold TechTV into G4, the video game channel Comcast had launched in 2002.
The press release was confident. "This merger is a win for G4; a win for TechTV; and a win for our advertising and affiliate partners," said Charles Hirschhorn, the G4 founder who became chief executive of the combined network, in Comcast's March 2004 announcement.
The merged channel, G4techTV, began on May 28, 2004, reaching about 42 million cable and satellite homes. It lasted less than nine months. Comcast sharpened the schedule around video games, dropped the TechTV half of the name on February 15, 2005, and the network went back to being plain G4.
The Screen Savers ended on March 18, 2005. Attack of the Show, a faster pop culture magazine program, premiered ten days later on March 28, 2005. Seven years of TechTV programming was gone inside a year of the sale.
Is TechTV still around in 2026?
No. TechTV has not existed as a television channel since February 15, 2005, and there is no streaming service, app or revival carrying the name in 2026. Comcast bought the company outright in 2004, so Comcast is who owns TechTV now, and it has left the brand dormant for more than twenty years.
The channel that absorbed it did not last either. G4 canceled X-Play and Attack of the Show in January 2013, ending X-Play after 1,378 episodes with a finale on January 23, 2013, and NBCUniversal wound the network down. Comcast Spectacor relaunched G4 on November 16, 2021 and shut it again on October 16, 2022, cutting 45 jobs.
"Over the past several months, we worked hard to generate that interest in G4, but viewership is low and the network has not achieved sustainable financial results," Comcast Spectacor chief executive Dave Scott said in the statement reported by Variety in 2022.
So the answer people are searching for is blunt. Both the channel that made The Screen Savers and the channel that killed it are off the air, and the same owner switched off both.
Where did the TechTV hosts go after 2005?
Leo Laporte announced in April 2004 that he and TechTV had parted company, weeks before Comcast closed the purchase. In 2005 he started the TWiT podcast network, named for its first show, This Week in Tech, and built it into one of the longest running independent podcast operations in the United States. TWiT was still recording from its studio in Petaluma, California in 2026.
Laporte also rebuilt the show itself. The New Screen Savers premiered on TWiT on May 2, 2015 with Patrick Norton, Kate Botello and Kevin Rose among the returning guests, and ran three seasons. Announcing the end in 2018, Laporte wrote that "The New Screen Savers just hasn't developed a big enough audience to pay for itself." The last episode aired December 29, 2018.
Kevin Rose left the fastest and landed hardest. He launched Digg on December 5, 2004, while still hosting, and introduced it to viewers on the show that month. The pattern repeated across the roster. The network died, the people did not.
Where can you watch old TechTV episodes today?
There is no official TechTV archive. Comcast has never released the catalog to streaming, and no service licenses it.
What survives is fan preservation. The Internet Archive hosts several large uploads of The Screen Savers, including a 17.3 GB collection of assorted episodes, an 83.5 GB set added on April 29, 2021 and a 37.9 GB set added on August 10, 2020, spanning 2002 through the G4 episodes of 2005. Call for Help and the earlier ZDTV shows turn up in the same collections.
The quality is what you would expect from twenty-year-old cable recordings pulled off VHS and TiVo drives. Watch a 2002 episode and the thing that dates it is not the hardware. It is the pace: two hours of live television about computers, made for people the hosts assumed were smart.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did TechTV shut down?
TechTV stopped existing as its own channel on May 28, 2004, when Comcast merged it with G4 to create G4techTV, and the TechTV name was dropped entirely on February 15, 2005. TechTV had launched as ZDTV on May 11, 1998, so the channel ran for just under seven years.
Who owns TechTV now?
Comcast owns TechTV. Comcast acquired all outstanding stock of TechTV from Paul Allen's Vulcan Programming for about $300 million in a deal completed on May 10, 2004, and has held the name since. The brand has been unused since February 2005, and Comcast has announced no plan to revive it.
When did The Screen Savers end and what replaced it?
The Screen Savers ended on March 18, 2005, after nearly seven years, and G4 replaced it with Attack of the Show on March 28, 2005. Leo Laporte revived the format independently as The New Screen Savers on his TWiT network, which ran from May 2, 2015 to December 29, 2018.