Free TV shows without the TV
By AARON BARNHART
The Kansas City Star
April 11, 2006
Here’s a revolutionary idea: Watch new episodes of “Desperate Housewives” for free. With commercials.
Doesn’t sound very radical?
Wait — did we mention the part where you don’t use your TV set?
ABC announced Monday that, during May and June, viewers will be able to stream episodes of its two most popular programs, “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives,” at no charge on ABC.com whenever they want to watch. In addition to those marquee shows, ABC and other networks owned by the Walt Disney Co. will stream full episodes of other programs, such as “That’s So Raven” and “Power Rangers.”
The catch: The free shows will be ad-supported and, unlike with your TV’s video recorder, you won’t be able to fast-forward through the commercials.
ABC’s announcement is the latest sign that some popular TV shows will become available by every means possible on every device with a screen, be it a 2-inch video MP3 player, 17-inch PC monitor or wall-sized home theater system.
It comes at a time when you can also get video content, called “mobisodes,” on your cell phone, and programs developed exclusively for the Web that will never see the inside of your TV. On Monday, the Television Academy announced five such programs nominated for this year’s new Emmy Award for “nontraditional viewing platforms.” They included a spinoff of Fox’s spy thriller “24” designed for cell phones, America Online’s coverage of last summer’s “Live 8” concerts and the independent Web sitcom, “It’s JerryTime!”
What was striking about ABC’s Monday announcement was that, for a change, it wasn’t highlighting one of those sleek handheld devices. Instead, the star was the humble personal computer. Before the iPod came along, the PC was considered the major challenger to TV, because it had a large screen and hundreds of millions of models in use.
Now that nearly 70 percent of American homes with Internet service have switched to broadband, there is a huge audience for streaming video on the PC. This has led to an explosion in content and more time spent online, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. It recently reported that the average surfer spends more than 30 hours a month online. That’s up more than 20 percent in the past two years.
Yet even as broadband usage has increased, so has time spent watching plain old TV, according to Nielsen. The number of people who have their TVs turned on while they surf the Web also continues to rise.
“There’s not a huge, demanding audience that wants everything on TV to be available on computer,” said Jon Winsell, director of online media strategy at ID Society. “We had video on demand 20 years ago. Consumers didn’t want it. It’s like videophones back in the 1970s. We had the technical capability; we just didn’t have the demand.”
Not only is TV not dying, there’s growing evidence that new media and old media are codependents. Take “The Office,” the NBC comedy starring Steve Carell as an obnoxious regional manager for a paper-supply company. After it debuted to modest ratings, NBC began offering full episodes on the iTunes Music Store. There, it became one of iTunes’s most downloaded shows and began making converts. They, in turn, started tuning into “The Office” on NBC, which has seen its audience grow this season… (continue)