Fox to stream series premiere of Fringe and season premiere of Terminator for free !
By fred | August 25, 2008
That’s no mistake : Fox will be streaming the two-hour series premiere of J.J. Abrams’ new series Fringe (which airs on September 9th at 8.00) as well as the second season premiere of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (which airs on September 8th at 8.00) for free on their very own website, the same days they air on Fox !
Once again Fox continues to show that it is now being the most exciting network around, both in terms of what series it airs and how it promotes said shows. And while others like The CW are still very much old school and try to go against the flow, for instance last season they decided not to put the last episodes of Gossip Girl online, hoping that would bring more viewers to the TV - which it obviously didn’t do (so, of course, episodes will be back online next season), Fox is going in the right way.
Of course, as you can imagine, there’s a catch : you’ll have to be on a US college campus to have access.
Still, this is a good step in the right direction, because more and more people are watching TV without a TV nowadays, but from online sources instead, and because those two shows are clearly targeting the beloved demo of which many people are college students, individuals very likely to have computers in their dorm rooms but no TV, this sounds like a perfect match.
And it is a fact : streaming full-length episodes of primetime series is mostly additive for the broadcast networks, and does little to threaten TV viewing. This has been known and repeated by the people involved, but network execs had trouble agreeing with it.
Recently though, a new report issued by CBS Interactive provided more evidence to support this theory, as it showed that only 46% of the network’s online audience primarily views their favorite shows online, and most say that the wide availability of these shows across the Internet does not impact their TV viewing. In fact, 35% of the nearly 50 000 streamers surveyed reported that they are more likely to view shows on the network as a result of having been exposed to content online.
Back at Fox: After noticing that .edu domains were among the top visitors of their website, Fox decided to see what they could do about it. As Fox Entertainment chairman Peter Liguori explained: “We talked about what we could do with colleges given the fact that we have so much traffic coming from them. The light bulb went off — by simul-streaming Fringe and Sarah Connor, (the college students) get to see the show, and we get the increased fanbase and buzz.”
Not only that, but the site will also offer up behind-the-scenes footage, cast interviews and music videos for college viewers.
How will this work ? Simple : anyone logging into Fox.com for a college-based .edu domain will be given full access to the streaming of those episodes on the same night as they return on television. Now, what does that mean is that many college student are probably setting up all kinds of proxy servers as we speak to allow people who are not on campus to benefit from the live streams as well…
Because really, while this is a good idea and a cool way to get people to talk about the shows, and the network, this is only a first step.
Fox hasn’t yet decided whether or not it will regularly stream episodes, series/season premieres as well as regular ones, simultaneously with their on-air runs. “We’ll see how this experiment goes” said Liguori.
Meanwhile, if you’re on campus and have your proxy thingy set up, let me know! ;)
Posted in News
Shows: Fringe, The Sarah Connor Chronicles
