On November 25, 2006, Leo Laporte announced on his KFIradio show that production of Call for Help would move from Toronto to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Rogers Communications, the owner of G4techTV Canada, contracted with Greedy Productions to produce the show. Laporte also announced that the show would be renamed The Lab with Leo Laporte and would be recorded in 16:9 High Definition. The Lab was titled as such due to Call for Help and its trademarks remaining the property of the AmericanG4 network and their corporate owner, Comcast, which had broken off contract talks with Laporte acrimoniously when the May 2004 purchase of the network was announced. Laporte traveled to Vancouver from his home in Petaluma, California monthly to record 15 episodes of the show. Episodes were typically recorded from Tuesday through Friday of the four-day "shoot week." Four shows were recorded live to XDCAM HD disc Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday; three episodes were recorded on Friday. One goal of recording in HD was to attract a U.S.-based distributor. The AmericanG4 ran the series for a short four-month period in 2007, but intentionally hampered it by airing it in a mid-morning timeslot without any later runs, meaning most of the show's audience was at work. On March 6, 2008, Leo Laporte announced on net@Nite #46 and via Twitter.com that Rogers had canceled The Lab after 195 episodes. He announced that as a result, he would be "ramping up video production from TWiT", his Petaluma-based netcast network of programming. The last episode of The Lab aired on August 1, 2008. Despite the severe aging of the episodes and the content within which does not apply to technology past Windows Vista or the original iPhone, G4 Canada continued to run the series in repeats on weekday mornings until the channel's shutdown on August 31, 2017, as the Canadian-based production helped the network both meet Canadian content guidelines and the bare requirements of the technology remit required by their Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commissionoperating agreement. The How-To Channel in Australia chose not to air the remaining episodes citing a lack of viewers, which is necessary to sustain airing the final episodes. In late April the following note was posted on their official site:
Please note that production on the show has ceased. We are no longer accepting tech question submissions or replying to general info emails.*
Segments
The show focused on answering viewers' technology related questions that had been submitted via the show's website. During each show, as many as four callers asked Laporte for solutions, on-air, to their technology questions. Questions were chosen by Laporte in advance of show taping, and callers appeared on the show via telephone and via Skype simultaneously. Kate Abraham, call coordinator, scheduled the callers and introduced them to Laporte during the show; Abraham also appeared in several segments throughout the show's run. Briana McIvor replaced Abraham as the call coordinator for episodes 181-195. The Lab also featured guests who presented technology products and technology tips, demonstrated software, and discussed technology issues, such as Internet security, with Laporte. Among the regular guests on The Lab were tech personalities Steve Gibson, Alex Lindsay, Chris Pirillo, and Andy Walker. Walker, along with Amber MacArthur, was Laporte's co-host on the Toronto-based Call for Help; Pirillo was the show's host for part of its earlier U.S.-based run. Members of Vancouver's technology community, such as Rick Yaeger and Kris Krug, became regular guests on The Lab. Each show also included a number of regular features. Yewell's Jewels was a free-file segment presented by chase producer, Ryan Yewell. The featured files included utilities, productivity tools, and entertainment software. Yewell also scheduled the guests that appeared on the show. Another regular feature was What the Tech? which served as a transition into and out of one of the show's commercial breaks. What the Tech? invited viewers to identify the subject of a close-up photograph of technology. Content producer Sean Carruthers created the segment and took the photographs used. Carruthers was also an on-air presence whom Laporte queried for additional suggestions regarding caller questions. In addition, Carruthers developed a regular segment entitled Sean's Shinies during which he demonstrated an interesting/unique tech product. One feature that served as a commercial transition was the Quick Quiz Question, a multiple-choice technology trivia game that occasionally had errors that made it to air.
