Just found out via Adam Ostrow at Mashable that Revision3 — the Web TV venture from the Digg boys, Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson — has laid off several people and shut down the filming of a few shows, including Internet Superstar with Martin Sargent and PopSiren with Sarah Lane. Interestingly enough, the hosts of both shows used to work on G4 and TechTV, the shows that Kevin Rose got his start on as a fresh-faced young geek (okay, he’s still a fresh-faced young geek, but you get my point). Sarah Lane is also the director of production for Revision3, according to her bio. There have been other executive layoffs as well apparently.
In what has to be a bandwidth cost-related move, Revision3 is also stopping distribution of two shows, including social-media guru Gary Vaynerchuk’s popular Wine Library. In a blog post about the moves, CEO Jim Louderback says that PopSiren and Internet Superstar “had great promise, but never really found their audience.” The company is also stopping production of a long-running show called Pixel Perfect, which was apparently an instructional program about using Photoshop. Some of the shutdowns have predictably had spinoff effects, as Liz Gannes describes at NewTeeVee.
Despite the layoffs, Louderback says the company still has high hopes for the shows it has launched through its startup effort, Revision3 Beta — a kind of farm-team approach to developing new talent and new shows — which got underway with seven shows last month.