Tekzilla

As suggested by Veronica Belmont herself, I checked out Tekzilla over the last week.  In short: I’ve unsubscribed to the combined feed, but subscribed to the daily tips.

The show seems a lot like something you’d see on TV (or you would if NZ TV had any tech shows).  I don’t enjoy watching those, so it’s not that surprising that I don’t like this (actually, I don’t think I watch any non-fiction on TV at all).  The biggest problem probably is that it seems like it’s aimed at people reasonably unfamiliar with technology.  So overall, if you do like watching TV tech shows, and you’re not all that tech-savvy, I think this would be a good show to watch.

Problems that I had with it:

• It’s way, way, too long.  It’s two to three times the length of CommandN, which I find too long.  I just don’t have that much eye-time available.
• I don’t know if it’s a deliberate style choice, or poor editing, or lack of practice, or something else, but seeing Patrick/Veronica change from looking at one camera to another is really irritating.  I would much prefer either a single angle or an edit that changed angle but always had the host looking in the right direction.
• Q&A style shows don’t interest me much, and it does seem to mostly be Q&A (I did only watch five of the full shows).
• The quality of the shows on the iTunes feed is terrible.  I’ve subscribed to the HD feed for the short shows, and that’s fine.  I can see that there would be reasons to make the default a low-quality one, but it does give a bad impression first up (especially if you don’t realise that there are other options).
• As above, the expected audience seems to be people much less familiar with how technology works than I am.  Obviously this isn’t a problem with the show, it’s just a poor match for me.
• I don’t mind commercials, but the ones they have seem extremely US-centric (do people in the US really not wear seatbelts?  We learnt to “make it click” like 20 years ago!), which is annoying.

That said, I think the hosts are both good (and I do think Veronica is better here than on Mahalo Daily, although I think she’s better still when she guests on TWiT), and the intro & outro are good also (catchy music, short, reasonable graphics).  The daily tips are also pretty good – most are things I already know or aren’t interested in, but they are short enough and well-done enough that I’ll watch 20 of them to get a single useful tip.