Huh?

Welcome to TWiT.tv! If you've stumbled upon this page and are wondering what it's all about, read on.

The TWiT.tv Story

It all started in 1998 with a small cable network called ZDTV, a channel dedicated to covering computers, the Internet, and personal technology. The people behind this site all worked on that network as hosts, reporters, or producers.

In 2004, ZDTV, then called TechTV, was sold and dismantled. Former TechTV hosts, Leo Laporte, Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, and John C. Dvorak, and producers Robert Heron, David Prager, and Roger Chang went on to other jobs, but we stayed in touch, with each other, and with fans of the late TechTV. Those fans told us again and again how important TechTV had been in their lives, and how much they missed the channel. We missed working with each other, too.

On a rainy evening in January, 2005 a few of of us got together for dinner after spending the day covering MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. Leo, who was working as a radio host, happened to have a microphone and recorder. He turned it on and recorded 20 minutes of idle chatter about the Expo and the tech world in general. He posted that recording on his web site. Within a few days tens of thousands of people had downloaded the recording. TechTV fans began clamoring for more. A few months later,TWiT was born.

We originally called the show The Revenge of The Screen Savers because that was the name of the defunct TV show many of us had worked on, but the cable channel that had bought TechTV complained, so we changed the name to this WEEK in TECH, or TWiT, for short. TWiT was pretty much true to that original recording: five or six of us gathered together in person or via Skype to shoot the breeze about the week's tech news. Leo whipped up this web site and began producing the show weekly. It very quickly became the most popular netcast on the Internet (more about netcasting/podcasting below). Generous fans provided enough money to pay for the equipment and web hosting and the site and the show began to grow.

With the success of TWiT, Leo became emboldened to produce other shows, each of them designed to recreate an aspect of the original TechTV. Since audio production was

From www.twit.tv/huh 1 29 November 2006 cheap and easy he stuck with audio, although a few video productions have sprung up since. Eventually he brought in other friends from the TechTV days, and a little netcast network was born. This site is the home of that network.

You'll find over a dozen different shows here, all covering some aspect of technology. Leo hosts and produces most of the shows, but some are produced by Alex Lindsay and The Pixel Corps. You can learn more about a show by clicking its name on the left side of this page. You can listen to any show (except MacBreak, which is video) by pressing play on the audio player built into each show's page. If you like a show you can subscribe to it using iTunes or other netcast/podcast programs.

All our shows are free. TWiT.tv is supported mostly by listener donations. A small $2/month recurring donation through Paypal keeps us afloat and earns you access to our private forums. There may be other benefits for donors in time, as well. But mostly you get the good feeling of knowing you're making these shows possible.

We're starting to bring in advertising, as well, but we're limiting it to companies we know and use ourselves. In time, some of us hope to be able to make TWiT.tv a full-time job and maybe even a full-fledged technology network.

Thanks for visiting TWiT.tv. We hope you enjoy the shows, and if you do, you'll share them with others. TechTV is gone, but its spirit lives on at TWiT.tv.

What Is A Netcast?

Netcasting (also known as "podcasting") is a great new way of distributing audio automatically. When a site (like this) offers a netcast feed you can subscribe to the feed using netcasting software and any new items will be automatically downloaded to your computer. If you have a portable audio player, the files can also be copied to the player. However, and this is a common area of confusion, no iPod or other MP3 player is required (that's one of the reasons we prefer the term "netcast" to "podcast"). You can listen to the audio on your computer just as you would any MP3. In fact, with our feeds you don't even need special software. Just click the feed link and download the show you want directly, or use the player built into every page.

If you decide you want to listen to a show every time it comes out, you might consider using a netcasting or podcasting client. Think of it as Tivo for Internet audio. You subscribe to content you want by visiting the web site and getting the netcast URL. Your netcast software automatically downloads any new shows and copies them to your MP3 player. There's always something new and interesting to listen to and you never have to check the web to see when a new show is available.

By far the easiest way to subscribe to netcasts is to install the free iTunes program for Windows or Macintosh. Once you've installed iTunes you can visit the TWiT page at the iTunes Music Store for links to all our shows. (Don't worry, even though they're in the iTunes Store, our netcasts are free!)

Visit Wikipedia for more information about netcasting/podcasting.

From www.twit.tv/huh 2 29 November 2006