What kind of content do you prefer on Giant Bomb TV

I definitely prefer shorter and older videos. I don't really like the random 2-hour out of context episodes and longer videos in general I get bored and do something else. Weird Quick Looks are always good though.

It would also be great if UPF had more descriptive titles as there are a few amazing ones which I wouldn't mind watching again.

What I want is the options, every so often, to vote for a marathon. Like let me vote for "The entire play-list of this or that game". Let the "Persona 4 Marathon" come up for a vote every so often.

The majority of GB content is gold, order isn't important, but a select number of the videos really benefit from watching in order, and in my mind are not worth voting otherwise. Like, maybe the P4 ER aside, is anyone going to vote for, say, episode 5 of the yazuka video? Or episode 15 of the X-com one? Etc.

I think having a wide variety of things to vote on is grand, but the same way it can be nice to binge-watch series via net-flix and cable/broadcast tv do marathons of long-running shows whose episodes tie into one another, I'd love to see GB tv get the option to vote for such.

@bladededge: Do you actually want 4 and a half days straight of the P4 ER??

Personally, I like it when TANGs show up. Also, 'blinking white guy'-worthy QLs - such as Dragon Ball: Evolution.

@beachthunder: Over christmas break, over a long week-end, as an alternative to E3 over-load? Sure, why not.

That said, throwing the single longest thing they have done at me as the example you cite as why what I say is unreasonable doesn't really invalidate my point. Do I want to see 4 days worth of P4? not often, once a year maybe, so don't have it come up often.

Do I care to have the chance to vote for one of the many 8-12 hours LPs they have in order? Absolutely.

My ordered preference from what you listed is definitely in this order:

1. Older Videos

And that's it. Quick looks are second by default because everything else is typically too long. The random long video is nice, though , like Hitmas for example.

@bladededge said:

Why does that need to be on GBTV, though? Why is that better than just running a playlist on your own time? Are people actually going to hang out in a chat for four days waxing nostalgic, or will there naturally come a point where that's just not fun anymore? Is that a fun way to introduce new people on an old series, or is that just for people who are watching it for the 10th+ time? Granted, I'm biased because I've never been a fan of the extended-series-playing-one-game shows anyway, especially not the ERs or anything Dark Souls, so any time any of that content comes up in GBTV I immediately check out, but it feels to me like what you want is a super specific thing that's not best served by GBTV.

I definitely feel like there's a smarter way of doing GBTV than the current system, as it's being pulled in too many different directions. I'm not a fan of episodes from series being played out of order, but I also don't necessarily want that whole series to play out marathon style. I'm also picky about what long-form content I'm interested in; like I said, ER can stuff it, but any old Dave Random PC game or obscure TNT and I'm all over it. UPF is definitely a problem, because the nature of the show means it's quite hit-or-miss, and the fact that just the date shows up on polls with no more context is not helpful at all. And I think pretty much everyone agrees that any long-form video that gets played twice in a short time span, such as last night when ep. 3 of the 2011 SNES marathon stream - a 3-hour video - was picked twice in a 12-hour period, is just not fun.

Part of the problem is the polls. It encourages people to make snap judgements, rather than actually think about what would be the best content for GBTV. I know that polls is something they're working on, but the system is definitely too open right now, and smarter filtering of chat options should be a high priority.

As for the long-play stuff, I almost feel like it should operate more like a TV channel, where at a certain time people know a long-form video is going to run like a TV movie, so at 12am and 12pm there is a 2+ hour video and there is a vote for which video people want. This is also how series could work; there could be a time-slot where people know a series is running, and that lets things play out in order without disrupting anything else. And the rest of the time is for shorter videos like QLs, previews, TANG, etc. I realise this would require much more engineering wizardry than the current system, but I really don't feel like GBTV can reach its true potential without some more curation and oversight on what content people get to vote on.

I wouldn't mind seeing more guests on UPF for example. Or maybe not just UPF either, maybe a separate shows where they play some games and shoot the shit with some devs or people with knowledge to share. I like when the East Coast people have game developers over who explain how games are made and so on. I have learned a lot from those streams eventhough they are fairly unhinged.

Also, I can never get enough VR stuff.. I would love to see some cross coast VR multiplayer nonsense. Rec Room is on all platforms right now... You can do a dungeon run with 4 people... Or maybe just get onboard the next multiplayer game that comes out that gains some traction, VR or otherwise. I just need more cross coast goodness!

I like the older videos like Happy Hour and TnT since a lot of that was before my time joining.

Watching Endurance Runs with a live chat sounds pretty cool actually. Like when FX did their Simpsons marathon and everyone would tweet about the same episode.

I personally like the idea of having the widest variety possible, like they do now. I like knowing anything can appear from the ether, whether it's a 3 minute video or a 3 hour E3 coverage video, etc. It's much more interesting to me to have it range so widely

This is pretty clever, and I wonder if it really would require as much wizardry as you suggest. Considering they already have shows broken out by category (well, most of them anyway) in the Videos section, I wonder if it would be all that hard to do something like three or four scheduled times for ongoing series' (ie. MGS at 10PM, Beast in the East at 2AM, Kerbal Space Program at 7AM and UPF at noon), user-voted Quick Looks blocked off in, I don't know, hour-and-a-half blocks, a nostalgia hour dispersed throughout and so on.

I think the greatest challenge you'd find there is that GBTV isn't supported by commercials and GB's content doesn't operate at set runtimes. It's a lot easier to schedule TV programming when you know every half-hour block is roughly 22 minutes of content and when you can arbitrarily cut up a movie to lengthen it to two or two and a half hours. I'm not sure what the solution would be on the Bomb's end. That's what top men are for, s'pose.

All Game Room, all the time

I guess I like a good variety, not multiple multi-hour shows in a row, but a few 5-minute TANG or ILM style things in-between the hour long QL's and maybe a couple of Mario Party Party 5's a day.

If there was a choice for "Random FMV Game," I'd choose it every time.

yeah having older (pre 2014 ) videos, especially from whiskey media or before, is what I vote for just about everytime. Preimum videos too, especially random PC game .

Stuff with Dave, Drew, and Vinny all together in the same video.

I'm generally more interested in watching weird older GB stuff (namely from the Whiskey Media/Ryan Davis era of things) than I am for stuff from relatively recent memory. It's not a slight against newer content, but I'd rather be surprised by something I literally haven't watched in 8 years (and stuff that I imagine a lot of newer members haven't seen) than I would watching a pretty great video from the last 3-4 years that I still remember pretty well.

FMV>Wishkey Media Stuff > Stuff with Dave in it.

As I said before, though perhaps dice roll is impracticable, I really do not like majority voting, either. Often but not always, it leads to videos being replayed, and counter to my own tastes, sometimes shows of certain types are favored consistently. There are ways I can rectify that. Perhaps using GB TV to research and view material I care about. I don't mean to be selfish, but hey the majority makes that same choice every time(with me even helping).. I am already thinking of a MGS 1 through 5 plus Peace Walker like another poster does. I've done that with endurance runs.

But it is many of those one-off videos and early Whiskey Media unique material I would like to see again....

I guess I'd have a preference for older stuff as well, it's fun to be surprised by a weird thing I'd forgotten they made or just something I haven't thought about in years.

I don't really have a preference. I want to turn it on when I have nothing else to watch and watch whatever is on and chat with folks. If I don't want to watch what is currently on I'll turn it off do something else and come back later. So GBTV is perfect for me because it fulfills that specific thing so well. I don't really get all the hand-wringing over what is being voted on. You can go watch anything and everything that's ever on that channel somewhere else at your discretion so getting mad that a majority voted on something you don't happen to be into seems silly to me. My only exception to that is the same video being played again after only a short amount of time but that has rarely happened in my experience.

Anything that's a year old or more is nice to see. Loads of good stuff from the last five years; doesn't just have to be the early days. Aside from that, I also greatly prefer shorter videos. Under an hour, please. I don't like watching things unless it's from beginning to end. If it's a thirty minute QL and I tune in halfway through, the waiting time till the next show isn't a big deal, but if I pop in forty minutes into a two and a half hour long feature, there isn't much of a point in me staying around.

Unfortunately, every single time I've gone into /tv it's always halfway through a chunk of a Big Live Live Show or some other ultra long video. Good stuff for sure, but not really what I'm looking when I drop into that channel. But, if that's what the people who are willing to stick it out in chat for a long time to vote want to see, who am I to argue? This probably just isn't for me.

The older live shows are fun to revisit

I always vote for persona 4 if it is an option.

Anything and everything. I like having it on in the background, no matter what it is.

Anything where Ryan is handed a random turkey

My favorites regardless of length or how recently they were made is just getting to re-watch or experience the odd bits of GB's library, whether that be a Sega CD stream archive or the GB 1-year anniversary party video that played the other day or even more recent one-off or unique stuff.

Older stuff, don't really care what it is. While I've been around since day one, I never really tuned in for a lot of the live stuff or series while it was happening until the last year or so. Seeing some of this stuff is great, a game room quick look played the other day where Ryan was fucking hating it...I've watched it about 10 times since.

I wonder if voting for a category of video instead of a specific video would work? If you mouse over the Videos tab there are a lot of categories. Maybe have the poll run continuously, let people have one vote every X minutes, and reset the poll every Y hours so GBTV doesn't end up playing any particular category for a week straight.

I don't know, just spitballin' here.

Oh, I love it all! Some of my favorite moments watching it so far have been when the chat voted for something I really didn't want to watch, and I still ended up enjoying myself. I wasn't a big fan of Austin, so I skipped all of the Kerbel stuff and some other East stuff during that time, so seeing some things I missed has been nice. And, as many have said already, I'll always be up for seeing older Whiskey stuff with Ryan, Dave, and others who aren't around anymore. All-in-all GBTV has been absolutely amazing in my book.