Gaming TV Channel To Launch In UK
by GL News
That's the wrong 'gaming tv' pic - Ed.
Well, as gamers, we’ve seen gaming TV shows come and go over the years, all with varying degrees of success, but now, it seems that we could end up with not just one gaming show to satiate our needs but, rather, a whole channel. Speaking at Edinburgh Interactive yesterday, GinxTV CEO Michiel Bakker, one of the original founders of MTV Networks Europe, announced plans to launch a dedicated UK TV channel for gaming.
“Launching our channel in the UK, the world’s second largest videogaming market, will propel Ginx to the big league. The next step for me is to accelerate the roll-out of fully localised channels in key markets around the globe.”
Bakker went on to say: “Video gaming is the only massively mainstream entertainment genre without a dedicated channel. My ambition here, is to do for gaming what MTV did for music. Video Gaming has broken through into mainstream entertainment, yet is thoroughly under-represented on TV.”
GinxTV UK will be hitting the airwaves at the end of November and hopes to achieve full distribution across Sky and Virgin networks. To think, we here at GLHQ were just crossing our fingers for a return of GamesMaster…now, we could end up with an ‘MTV for gaming’. Cynical heads have to rule over beating hearts though and, while it is a fantastic idea, with no shortage of scope, it will be interesting to see if GinxTV can pull it off and sustain the momentum they’ll undoubtedly start with.
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Anyone else find the name a bit shit?
Yeah, that’s exactly what I said when I read it as Lorna was covering it. Just… weird really. I suppose it’s always a good idea to have a catchy name that doesn’t mean anything relevant to the purpose like Yahoo or eBay, or even Amazon, but it’s just a bit odd. Is it GHINKS with a hard G or JINKS with a soft?
“My ambition here, is to do for gaming what MTV did for music” So plenty of adverts with snippets of gaming.
It would be nice if they brought shows like Gametrallers TV which shows once a week on Spike TV in America. Gametrailers is owned by MTV so you never know.
To my mind, MTV was okay for a couple of years, because it gave the world Peter Gabriel and Buggles music videos. And then it went shit, and ruined music.
I’m really not convinced that’s a good idea, to try and emulate that for gaming. A few years of decent exposure followed by a massive commercialised dumbing down of the medium in the mainstream is more harmful than anything.
I’m at a loss to think that the channel could be called instead… GTV is far too close to GMTV. And for all I know, it could even be one of the gay adult channels on Sky already.
Of course, this may not even work, and get closed down again after a few years. The UK no longer has an anime channel, despite the popularity of the medium, because the channel’s output went downhill. It’s really hard to say at this point what direction the thing will go in.
I’m looking forward to seeing this, especially as I met some of the people involved with this at the We Sing Encore event, and they were hilarious, awesome people.
Oooooooh get you