It’s how the Perez Hiltons of the world get into trouble: Become successful enough with your edgy Internet commentary about the subject of your choice, and you just may become part of the world you made your name snarking about from the shadows. Awkward! But the folks at Geek Entertainment TV put themselves on the map with a different style of vlogging – one so gleefully dorky and un-meanspirited that they’re now more famous than most of what they cover, and nobody minds one bit.
It all began in November of 2005, when freelance writer Irina Slutsky was doing the bulk of her mingling at launch parties thrown by tech startups. In a burst of inspiration, she asked friend Eddie Codel to bring a video camera along, and she started interviewing the tech-savvy party guests about Web 2.0, memes, and 2257 laws. Editor-in-crime Codel made it all come together, and in a burst of never-has-anything-been-so-accurately-named-ness, Geek Entertainment TV was born.
Obviously, there was a market. By February of 2006, GETV was celebrating its 1000th subscriber, and by July of that year, they’d been acquired by Podtech, allowing Slutsky and Codel to get their geek on full-time.
So what makes GETV such a hit? Slutsky, Codel, and guests like “roboreporter” Violet Blue know their stuff. No, really. They know the technology, they know the trends, they know how to deliver what geeks like, like Halo 3, Ask a Ninja, and robots … and they know not to take it too seriously. Watching GETV is like hanging out at the coolest, dorkiest, most well-informed clubhouse ever. It is, in short, geek heaven.
GETV and Podtech parted ways in 2007, but by August of that year, they had a sponsorship deal with GoDaddy. They continue to cover web content and tech shows, reporting, as they say, from “deep inside the bubble.” But they’ve also branched out to technology-free areas of geekdom, like pillow fights and cat shows.
And of course, there was the time their piece on Digg 3.0 got dug. To borrow a GETV favorite buzzword, how very meta of them.
See our previous coverage:
