Sweden has a new IT television program, called Metro Teknik.

Ten years ago there were many such programs, in English at least. One of the best was “The Site” on MSNBC, carried here on NBC Europe. Soledad O’Brian was the host, and Leo Laporte added his talents as the virtual coffee bartender Dev Null.

Ziff Davis had a bunch of programs as part of their ZDTV, and C-Net had some excellent offerings. These were available on various local broadcast and cable stations.

“The Site” ended with the death of Princess Diana, when MSNBC went to round-the-clock Diana coverage. The program was preempted and never returned to the air. The other tech TV shows eventually just disappeared. (Leo Laporte seems to be trying to bring back the idea online as part of his TWIT network.) Even though interest in IT is greater than ever today, for some reason the people who run cable networks don’t think we are interested in programs on the subject.

Some time ago the Swedish edition of “Metro” the freebie newspaper from the Kinnevik media empire, launched a spin-off called “Metro Teknik”, mostly about IT news. Last night a TV version premiered on TV8, one of the handful of Swedish television stations owned by Kinnevik.

I missed the beginning, as my cable box wasn’t programmed for TV8, and it took a while to find it. By the time I did, I had missed the top stories and they were just starting the game review section. My 14 year watched for about 30 seconds before he got bored and wandered off. This does not bode well.

They finished the program with a lengthy report on cars. This seems to be a by-product of the definition of the word “teknik” in Swedish. Any Swedish magazine with “Teknik” in the title is almost certainly about cars. This is of course puzzling to anyone else. For some reason the word means car technology in Swedish, so a TV program called “teknik” apparently can’t just be an IT program, it has to have cars too.

One hopes the people at “Metro” come to their senses and understand that car fanatics and geeks are two different demographics. Do a car program if you want, but don’t mix it up with the IT program that we really need.