Game channel G4 bows with 7 days of Pong

Cyberbiz Brief

By DAVID BLOOM

G4, the new Comcast Cable channel built around the culture of vidgames, will paddle onto screens in 3 million homes today with a week of broadcasts of "Pong" matches, in tribute to the vidgame biz's first breakout hit now celebrating its 30th anniversary.

"We batted this idea back and forth," joked Charles Hirschhorn, founder and CEO of G4 Media. " 'Pong,' though it wasn't the first videogame, was the first in most people's homes. G4 owes a debt to 'Pong.' "

Comcast is launching the cabler on systems owned by it and Insight Communications to subs largely concentrated in the Northeast. The channel will feature 13 original entertainment series, based around vidgames, with previews of upcoming titles, "making-of" docs, tournament reports and more. For the first seven days, though, Hirschhorn promised to show "good, competitive 'Pong' play" around the clock, sometimes featuring humans against each other, sometimes just a single human against the machine.

Hirschhorn said the company has done "better than expected" in securing advertisers, both from the booming $9.4 billion vidgame biz and from more traditional consumer-products companies trying to reach the channel's key demographic, teen and young-adult males. Hirschhorn declined to detail which companies have bought advertising, or how much of the company's ad inventory has been sold so far.