What happened to the New Screensavers? I miss it!

I loved the show, used to watch it on my FireTV all the time. Am sad it’s gone. What’s the story there?

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Leo said it was costing too much to produce and bringing in too little, so unfortunately he couldn’t afford to run it at a loss any longer.

Edit: I recall he also said how it was his favourite show to produce. I miss it too.

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Have you seen the final episode? Leo explained that there was not enough viewers of the show to justify continuing it.

I miss it too. It was my favorite show that they did. I remember the original Screensavers as well

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I miss it a lot, I wish more people watched it…

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I think TWiT shows that are more video-oriented would do better in viewership if they were more Youtube/Twitch/Mixer native in format, while still replicated/backed up on TWiT.tv so that there’s always that TWiT-controlled platform to fall back to (never fully trust these big platforms further than you can throw them).

I don’t have the metrics to back this up, but I suspect most people are discovering video content via those platforms, and most of TWiT’s audience are legacy (number of viewers/listeners who go back to TechTV days or find it through TTG).

The concept of a tech variety show was good, but most of the audience were probably fans of the original Screensavers… and likely only a fraction of the original audience would even have been aware of its existence.

Linus (of Linus Tech Tips) right now with LTT/Floatplane is doing essentially what Leo did with TWiT, except it’s more of an platform model with the Floatplane side, which is subscription-based and hosts other video techtubers.

LTT itself has a studio, a few dozen employees, a weekly tech show, a daily tech news show, reviews… it’s essentially TWiT with more hardware focus. But I think he’s doing interesting things by both owning their own platform and having a sizeable audience on Youtube.

They get the views because they know how to game (I mean that in a good way) the algos and reach their audience, albeit with sometimes clickbaity titles and thumbails, which does work and it’s why there are quite a number of techtubers at the 1 million subs mark or higher now. TWiT is pretty old school, a radio show by design, and that’s both a good and bad thing. It’s big enough to sustain itself, but not every show that launches will be a success, which is also true of other networks.

EDIT: looking at YouTube, The New Screensavers has a decent number of subs (31k) which might have reached critical mass and gained momentum were it on a bit longer. Youtube subs tend to snowball close to the 100k mark, I think partly because of their recommendation algorithms. Looking at some of the comments on the last video, people liked it, but more than a few only discovered it late. There’s very little discoverability of long-form content that isn’t tailored to take advantage of the platform it’s on.

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One of my favourites too, but understandable that it wasn’t worth continuing, must’ve taken a lot to produce.

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It was my favorite TWiT show ever. :sob:

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Even futher to the story, sponsorships make up the entirety of the show.

Now you know why TechTV incarnations passed the same fate.

The fact that you just noticed The New Screen Savers was gone tells the story. I think people loved the idea of NSS, and I loved doing it, but they didn’t watch it.

The audience numbers were low and dropping.

I do shows because I love the topic and want to do them, but the brutal facts of the business are, if a show can’t make money I can’t afford to keep doing it. That means:

  1. It needs an audience of 30K or higher. 50K is really the realistic minimum.
  2. People have to buy ads on it.
  3. The ads have to work or advertisers won’t return.

Studio time for us is about $1000/hour. Our web site is $15K/month. We employ 20 full-time staffers. Hosts, even outside hosts, are well paid for their time. TWiT is not your average podcast network. It’s really more like a small TV station. We do some pro-bono shows (like FLOSS Weekly) and new shows have some time to build an audience, but in general shows have to pay for themselves eventually. Economics is a bear.

TL;DR: We do it for love, but we still have to pay the staff!

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I too miss the show. I thought it was well produced, and I always enjoyed seeing the guests that were brought in.

However, I do understand the economics of the situation. Just because Leo loves a show, doesn’t mean the show can sustain itself.

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Leo, I loved the show but admit I didn’t watch each one. I prefer to listen, but liked the option. However, I noticed it was missing back in January!

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I watched live almost every episode, and the The Tech Guy. I don’t type fast enough to be in the chat room.

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I enjoyed the New ScreenSavers and managed to get down and see it live (Brickhouse and East Side), in the studio several times. I got to read the open when Google Home got hacked, Qubes OS was in studio and Megan got trained to fight like a Jedi (I still have the script).

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Wait, what The new screen savers.
Yea it is missed, Had some great guests on and learned about some new tech there. I understand the cost involved, and there is no way this was an audio only show.
@Leo thanks for doing it anyway and remember if you dont succeed try, try again.
I have noticed Floss has had 2 promo spots the last few weeks so is that an uptick?

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I know this is an old thread and commenting on it is beating a dead horse, but I wasn’t on here when it originally posted. Just wanted to say that barely a Saturday afternoon goes by that I still don’t miss this show. My partner and I watched it every single week; it was our hands-down favorite on TWiT. Just pure joy start to finish. I can’t believe the ratings were so low, esp. considering some of the garbage on other platforms that gets millions of views. Oh well, such is the world today…RIP old friend.

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Yes, it was a fantastic show. I really loved the original version too.

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Yep, it was my favourite show while it was on. One I definitely watched on YouTube when a new episode was posted.

Maybe there will be. New New Screensavers some day.

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