How's that for an image? :)
I've been quite intrigued by Showtime's Fat Actress tie-in with Yahoo!, where essentially Y! "broadcast" the pilot episode of the show (I don't think it was simultaneous/real time) for the first week after it aired.
Some preliminery Initiative/Comscore numbers came out offering up the following nuggets:
- The Showtime airing of the program on March 7 received a .62 household rating, which translates into 942,000 viewers.
- Yahoo reached another 16,000 viewers (I'm assuming these are total views i.e. entire show)
- Including people who viewed individual scenes i.e. not the whole show, this number climbs to 197,000.
- Including multiple views of the video, the number of visitors hit nearly 390,000 in the first two days.
- The findings put the Web's portion of total viewership of Fat Actress at 16 percent
The data above is decidedly mixed. To be fair I would summarize this is as follows, "the results of the first test are in and the overall synopsis would be....encouraging...keep on keeping on."
Personally, I don't think the content was that compelling.
I don't think this model works as well for anything other than a premium pay channel e.g. HBO/Showtime etc.
I don't know if consumers watching 30 minutes of uninterrupted content will ever work on the Web (you get a sense of this by the 16,000 versus 181,000 (197 - 16) numbers
...also the multiple views number is a bit of a Red Herring, because I don't know if this is an apples to apples comparison with actual Television (multiple views are somewhat unknown)
So in summary...nice efforts. Let's see what happens when they do it with the Sopranos :)
