One of the most baffling things I find as a gamer is the lack of quality TV shows about games. Playr seems to have died a tragic death, The Ginx Files is fairly good, as is GameFace – but that’s where the trail ends. Well good news today as the UK is to get its first 24/7 videogaming TV channel – which will start at the end of November.
Our saviours are Ginx TV – the lot behind Gameface, and the channel will be shown on Virgin and Sky channels.
CEO Michiel Bakker had the following to say;
“The Ginx channel is going to be an evolution rather than an overnight revolution. Is it a good TV show to watch people play games? Does that make for good TV? If it does we’ll do it. If it doesn’t we won’t.
You have to understand that in a 24 hour channel there will be elements of repeat. We’re not doing 24 hours fresh content one hour after the other. That would be too ambitious. So there’s a healthy level of repeat in it.”
Ginx TV is hoping to launch with four shows, and may be in HD. Hopefully it will be able to tread the fine line between being informative whilst not coming across as patronising.
Source: Eurogamer
Smoutefretter_BE
Great to see the UK residents are getting this.
We in Belgium (yes BELGIUM) already have a TV-channel dedicated to games for over a year now (GUNKtv).
the channel as a whole is entertainment (WWE, UFC, LFL, MUSIC, Games etc.)
On that TV-channel there are several gaming shows:
– gameforce one (pre-reviews)
– start to game (wii like stuff and PSN, Xlive)
– praga goes gaming (praga the host plays games with a dev. someone from gunk or others)
– summer game show (re-previews)
and soon they’re starting with another game show
so all in all it’s good to see so many gameshows on tv.
Grey_Ghost13
Will be interesting to see what they put together, will probably be lots of re-runs, which I don’t think could work for games as everything has to be current, exclusive, previews etc… This is where Firstplay seems to fail as whatever they report on has been in the public eye for too long already.
Dunks
I used to work with Michiel Bakker at MTV UK. He used to head things up there so this could be decent.