Revision3 was a

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

–based multi-channel television network that created, produced and distributed

streaming television Streaming television is the digital distribution of television content, such as films and television series, streamed over the Internet. Standing in contrast to dedicated terrestrial television delivered by over-the-air aerial systems, cable t ...

shows on niche topics. Founded in 2005, it operated as a subsidiary of Discovery Digital Networks since 2012. The network produced technology and gaming oriented programming in tandem with traditional comedic, political, DIY, and movie-related content. On March 31, 2017, Discovery Communications closed the website.

History

The company was founded in

Los Angeles, California Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...

, by Jay Adelson,

Kevin Rose Robert Kevin Rose (born 1977) is an American entrepreneur, Internet entrepreneur who co-founded Revision3, Digg, Pownce, and Milk. He also served as production assistant and co-host at TechTV's ''The Screen Savers''. From 2012 to 2015, he was ...

and David Prager in April 2005. Dan Huard, Keith Harrison, and Ron Gorodetzky were also involved. Most of them were previously employees of the

television Television (TV) is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. Additionally, the term can refer to a physical television set rather than the medium of transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertising, ...

network

TechTV TechTV was an American cable television channel with a focus on technology. It was launched as ZDTV on May 11, 1998, by computer magazine publisher Ziff Davis, Ziff-Davis following two short-lived technology-based programs by the company. Init ...

. Show development began in July 2003 with a podcast series called '' thebroken'', a videozine related to computer hacking featuring Rose and Huard. After TechTV merged with G4 and removed most of its technology related programming, Rose and Huard were inspired to create a new series, ''Systm'', in May 2005, which is geared toward "the common

geek The word ''geek'' is a slang term originally used to describe Eccentricity (behavior), eccentric or non-mainstream people; in current use, the word typically connotes an expert or enthusiast obsessed with a hobby or intellectual pursuit. In th ...

". Rose left his job as a host of the G4 series '' Attack of the Show'' (formerly ''

The Screen Savers ''The Screen Savers'' is an American TV show that aired on TechTV from 1998 to 2005. The show launched concurrently with the channel ZDTV (later known as TechTV) on May 11, 1998. ''The Screen Savers'' originally centered on computers, new techn ...

'') on May 27, 2005, to work full-time for Revision3 Corporation. The popular show '' Diggnation'', also starring Rose, followed in July 2005, forming the first three shows of the new network. Alex Albrecht joined Revision3 on August 5, 2005, to co-host ''Diggnation'' with Rose and contribute to other projects while Prager focused on production and business development. It was announced on July 10, 2007, that Jim Louderback would become the new

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization. CEOs find roles in variou ...

of the Revision3 Corporation. He previously worked as editor-in-chief for

PC Magazine ''PC Magazine'' (shortened as ''PCMag'') is an American computer magazine published by Ziff Davis. A print edition was published from 1982 to January 2009. Publication of online editions started in late 1994 and continues . Overview ''PC Mag ...

, a publication of

Ziff Davis Ziff Davis, Inc. is an American digital media and internet company. Founded in 1927 by William Bernard Ziff Sr. and Bernard George Davis, the company primarily owns technology- and health-oriented media websites, online shopping-related servi ...

. He was followed by Patrick Norton in August 2007, who worked at Ziff Davis as 'head of podcasts' and host of the

IPTV Internet Protocol television (IPTV), also called TV over broadband, is the service delivery of television over Internet Protocol (IP) networks. Usually sold and run by a Telephone company, telecom provider, it consists of broadcast live telev ...

show ''DL.TV''. At Revision3, he was Managing Editor and the co-host of ''Systm'', ''

Tekzilla Revision3 was a San Francisco, California, San Francisco–based Multi-channel network, multi-channel television network that created, produced and distributed streaming television shows on niche topics. Founded in 2005, it operated as a subsidia ...

'', and ''

HD Nation Revision3 was a San Francisco, California, San Francisco–based Multi-channel network, multi-channel television network that created, produced and distributed streaming television shows on niche topics. Founded in 2005, it operated as a subsidia ...

''. At ''DL.TV'', he was replaced by Roger Chang who in turn left DL.TV and Ziff Davis in December 2007 to join Revision3. Chang has joined Norton as co-producer of ''Systm'' and ''Tekzilla''. All three had previously worked at

. On April 9, 2008, Revision3 announced that Veronica Belmont would be joining the Revision3 staff as co-host of ''Tekzilla''. On April 21, 2008, on the 47th episode of ''Systm'', it was announced that Chief Engineer and co-host David Randolph had left for another job outside of Revision3. On June 6, 2008, CEO Jim Louderback cancelled the show Social Brew after only four episodes. Previous to the announcement Revision3 employee Neha Tiwari was let go without notice. In September 2008, Revision3 started Revision3 Beta, a "talent-farming" sub-network of unofficial shows headed by Martin Sargent. On June 16, 2009, Patrick Norton announced that Systm would no longer be a weekly show, instead becoming segments within his other show,

. He also announced that he would be launching a new show in July called

, which will be a show all about HD and

Home Theatre A home cinema, also called home theater, is a home entertainment audio-visual system that seeks to reproduce a movie theater experience and mood using consumer grade electronic video and audio equipment and is set up in a private home. In t ...

. It will be co-hosted by Robert Heron who was a co-host on DL.TV, with Patrick Norton, and then remained host for 23 months after Norton left. On October 10, 2010, Revision3 launched a show from the popular gaming website

Destructoid ''Destructoid'' is a website that was founded as a video game-focused blog in March 2006 by Yanier Gonzalez, a Cuban-American cartoonist and author. Enthusiast Gaming acquired the website in 2017 and sold it to Gamurs Group in 2022. Histor ...

, which recaps the latest news in video games 3 times a week in studio starring employees Max Scoville and Tara Long. On August 25, 2011, Past host of Bytejacker Anthony Carboni started a video game review show called "New Challenger" where other reviewers are pitted against Anthony's review, whether it be from a live guest or sourced from other popular websites. They subsequently started Rev3Games, a centralised channel for this and short bonus content. On March 13, 2011, Revision3 announced a partnership with

Gawker Media Gawker Media LLC (formerly Blogwire, Inc. and Gawker Media, Inc.) was an American internet media company and Link farm#Blog network, blog network. It was founded by Nick Denton in October 2003 as Blogwire, and was based in New York City. Incorpor ...

which would bring its most popular websites to video podcasting. This started with

Lifehacker ''Lifehacker'' is a weblog about life hacks and software that launched on 31 January 2005. The site was originally launched by Gawker Media and is owned by Ziff Davis. The blog posts cover a wide range of topics including Microsoft Windows, M ...

, a show showing small tips to improve your life. This was followed up a year later on April 13, 2012 by

io9 ''io9'' is a sub-blog of the technology blog ''Gizmodo'' that focuses on science fiction and fantasy pop culture, with former focuses on science, technology and futurism. It was created as a standalone blog in 2008 by editor Annalee Newitz under ...

with a Tekzilla-like show called "We Come from the Future", where the editors of io9 discuss the latest news in science and sci-fi. It ran for 32 episodes and ended November 16, 2012. On 11 August 2011, Jay Adelson (founder of Revision3) started a show responding to questions for entrepreneurial, company and business advice called "Ask Jay". Diggnation announced that it would stop production of episodes from the end of 2011, which caused massive uproar. As consolation for this, production star Glenn McElhose started his own show called "Toasted Donut" on November 15, 2011, where he experiments with different formats. The last episode went ahead live at the Music Box on December 30, 2011, skipping to episode #420 for a 2-parter. On May 3, 2012,

Discovery Communications Discovery, Inc. was an American multinational mass media factual television conglomerate based in New York City. Established in 1982, the company operated a group of factual and lifestyle television brands, such as the namesake Discovery Cha ...

announced that it had entered into an agreement to acquire Revision3. The transaction closed on June 1, 2012.

Shows

Diggnation

Diggnation was a weekly video podcast, airing from 2005 to 2011. Hosted by

and Alex Albrecht, the show centered on casual discussion of news items posted to the social news aggregator

Digg Digg (stylized in lowercase as digg) is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select articles specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral phenomenon, viral Internet iss ...

(of which Rose was a co-founder). TRS Shoot

The Totally Rad Show

The Totally Rad Show was a weekly, later turned daily,

video podcast A podcast is a program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. Typically, a podcast is an episodic series of digital audio files that users can download to a personal device or stream to listen to at a time of their ...

produced by ''Team Awesome, LLC'' and distributed by Revision3. TRS consisted primarily of reviews and commentary on pop-culture phenomena such as

movie A film, also known as a movie or motion picture, is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, emotions, or atmosphere through the use of moving images that are generally, sinc ...

video game A video game or computer game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface or input device (such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device) to generate visual fe ...

television programs A television show, TV program (), or simply a TV show, is the general reference to any content produced for viewing on a television set that is broadcast via Terrestrial television, over-the-air, Satellite television, satellite, and cable te ...

, and

comic book A comic book, comic-magazine, or simply comic is a publication that consists of comics art in the form of sequential juxtaposed panel (comics), panels that represent individual scenes. Panels are often accompanied by descriptive prose and wri ...

s. Hosted by Alex Albrecht, Jeff Cannata, and Dan Trachtenberg, the show ran between 2007 and 2012. In 2008, the show received a People's Voice

Webby Award The Webby Awards (colloquially referred to as the Webbys) are awards for excellence on the Internet presented annually by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a judging body composed of over three thousand industry experts a ...

and the "Best Produced" Podcast Award.

Tekzilla

Tekzilla was an American

on the Revision3 network (''Tekzilla'' was released every Tuesday). It was hosted by Patrick Norton and Shannon Morse, with Roger Chang (who also acts as the show's producer) as a frequent guest host. For the first 14 episodes of ''Tekzilla'', Patrick's co-host was Jessica Corbin, who made a guest appearance on episode 16 confirming she has left the show. In November 2013, Veronica Belmont left the show. She had been a host on Tekzilla since 2008. Shannon Morse became the new host. On November 25, 2014, Tekzilla aired for the final time. Starting in January 2015, Patrick Norton and Shannon Morse went on to create and host TekThing, funded by

Patreon Patreon (, ) is a monetization platform operated by Patreon, Inc., that provides business tools for content creators to run a subscription service and sell digital products. It helps artists and other creators earn a recurring income by provid ...

and recorded in the Hak5 studio. For a few weeks in 2008, Revision3 broadcast ''Tekzilla'' live; this was stopped for unknown reasons. However, PA Serafina was quoted on the forums for saying, "There's details and red tape we still need to figure out. I'll keep you updated". In more recent episodes viewers were urged to upload video questions on YouTube; building on this Roger Chang mentioned during one of the 2008 live shows that he thought having live

Skype Skype () was a proprietary telecommunications application operated by Skype Technologies, a division of Microsoft, best known for IP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice calls. It also had instant messaging, file transfer, ...

calls would be a good addition to the show. However, now that live shows have ceased this never happened. Since Spring 2009, ''Tekzilla'' has had a change of set, as pictured to the left. This includes a new area with a cityscape with red sunrays (similar to the ''Tekzilla'' logo) behind it. In addition, the old faux brick wall has been painted white and has had various other cosmetic changes from the 2007-2009 set. The set has two Vizio televisions – on ''Tekzilla Daily'' they are used to show screenshots, on the main show they are mostly used to show the ''Tekzilla'' logo and occasionally the output of a monitor. Since January 2009, the ''Tekzilla'' set has occupied the space previously used by ''Internet Superstar'', a previous Revision3 show. ''Tekzilla Daily Tip'', formerly ''Tekzilla Daily'', was a daily videocast made by the cast and crew of ''Tekzilla'', originally starring Patrick Norton and later starring Veronica Belmont with Norton occasionally filling in for Belmont. Episodes were generally 1 minute to 3 minutes long. Tips are usually broken down and include various categories;

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

Mac OS Mac operating systems were developed by Apple Inc. in a succession of two major series. In 1984, Apple debuted the operating system that is now known as the classic Mac OS with its release of the original Macintosh System Software. The system ...

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curr ...

iTunes iTunes is a media player, media library, and mobile device management (MDM) utility developed by Apple. It is used to purchase, play, download and organize digital multimedia on personal computers running the macOS and Windows operating s ...

, and occasionally other topics. The videocast ended on September 12, 2013, with an announcement by Belmont. On November 16, 2010, ''Tekzilla''s producers announced that the show would be expanded to two full episodes per week, with ''

'' becoming part of ''Tekzilla'' and its host Robert Heron joining as a third presenter.

CO-OP

CO-OP was a weekly podcast show about games - it released in 2009, and ended in 2010.

AppJudgment

AppJudgment was a web show produced by Revision3 that focused on reviewing and exploring mobile apps across various platforms, including iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. It provided tech enthusiasts with updates on the latest app trends, in-depth reviews, and user-friendly recommendations. The show was hosted by many different hosts from the Revision 3 team such as Jackie Talbot ,Mauricio Balvanera ,Anthony Carboni ,Annie Gaus and Stephanie Chu using the same short format from the Tekzilla Daily Tip and the same set that was used by Tekzilla The show gained popularity through its YouTube channel, which reached over 57,000 subscribers and nearly 20 million views. Its engaging format and expert analysis made it a go-to source for anyone interested in mobile technology.

References

{{Revision3 Internet television channels Podcasting companies Privately held companies based in California Internet properties established in 2005 Internet properties disestablished in 2017 Multi-channel networks