Seven Years of GIGA

German television keeps pulling the floor out from under me. First The O.C. vanishes and probably won’t resurface until autumn on a premium channel. Then the Simpsons slot gets handed to some love-triangle soap knockoff. And now this: GIGA is shutting down on March 31st.

GIGA was Germany’s dedicated gaming and geek-culture TV channel—think G4 but actually watchable, running since 1998 with two studios operating in parallel, one in Cologne and one in Berlin. NBC Universal, the parent company, has decided it has other plans for the format. I hadn’t been watching long enough to have caught all seven years of it, but what I did see I genuinely loved. The back-and-forth between the Cologne and Berlin teams worked—they balanced each other instead of competing for camera time, which is rarer than it sounds.

It was one of those shows that made afternoons livable. You came home, switched it on, and everything got a little better. I’m going to miss that more than I thought I would.

And to the Cologne team specifically: sort it out. The arrogant esports coverage, the gutted editorial lineup, the endless internal sniping—none of that is a channel anyone wants to watch. If you get a second shot at filling this space, don’t waste it the way you’ve been heading.

Goodbye, GIGA.