Shouldn’t Gossip Girl (and the CW’s Other Shows) Be Online by Now?
For the last five weeks of its freshman season, the CW discontinued posting its buzzy but largely unwatched series Gossip Girl online, as part of an effort to drum up its oldteevee viewer numbers. We newteevee watchers booed and hissed, hoping the ploy wouldn’t work and set an example for other networks. Ratings stayed low, but the series got renewed, and then over the summer, the CW said it would reverse its policy and post Gossip Girl online when it returned to the air in September.
But…It’s been nearly a week since the series’ sophomore debut, and episode 1 still isn’t online. Standard practice among the TV networks is to post shows online after they air in Hawaii; if not then, sometime soon the next day. A week is pushing it. We have to wonder if the CW is reneging on its reversal.
Furthermore, as far as I can tell, the CW hasn’t posted any episodes from its new season; what seems to be the most recent video in its full episode queue is an episode of Everybody Hates Chris that originally aired in May. Either the guy who loads new videos into the system quit last week, or there’s been an unacknowledged policy reversal. And this at a time when networks across the board are posting more and more of their shows for free, ad-supported streaming online, in some cases before they air on TV.
As for actual broadcast television, interpretations of Gossip Girl’s season premiere’s ratings were mixed; on the one hand, the episode failed to top last season’s premiere, and it got beat by the CW’s 90210 revival the next night; on the other hand, it apparently did amazingly great with women aged 18 to 34. Meanwhile, Gossip Girl was promptly posted on iTunes after it aired. And nearly a week later, it still occupies the No. 1 slot. (The show has done well all along on iTunes, and probably since people actually pay $1.99 for it there the CW hasn’t messed with that success.) One Tree Hill is at No. 2, while 90210 doesn’t seem to have been posted at all.
We’ve tried to contact the CW’s press department through official means, but that hasn’t worked so far, so maybe blogging will do the trick. Hey CW, whatever happened to posting your shows online?
Comments (7)
Linkbacks (2)
-
[...] Source [...]
Gossip Girl Central | Your #1 Source For…
— 11:27 AM on September 8, 2008
-
[...] Girl Returns to Streaming You’ll be happy to know that the CW, either egged on by our post asking for online episodes (probably not) or sticking with a stupidly long planned delay, has, in [...]
Gossip Girl Returns to Streaming «…
— 2:22 PM on September 9, 2008
Leave a Reply
Popular
- Tumblr Marriage Proposal: Behind the Scenes of Justin and Marissa's Engagement
- BitTorrent After The Pirate Bay: Do You Still Need Trackers?
- Ten Sites for Free and Legal Torrents
- The Megawoosh Waterslide Viral: How It Was Really Done
- Nielsen: Facebook Now the No. 3 Video Site
- Six Steps To Get More HD From Your Scientific Atlanta Set-top Box
Recent
Network
- Skype CEO Outlines Platform Ambitions, Hiring Plans [GigaOM]
- Earth2Tech Week in Review [Earth2Tech]
- WWD Weekend Reading List [WebWorkerDaily]
- WinMo Wrap: Marketplace Hits All WM 6.x Phones; Opera Mobile Advances [jkOnTheRun]
- Weekly App Store Picks: November 21, 2009 [TheAppleBlog]
- Get Ready for Flash Player 10.1 to Stream P2P Video to Millions, Swap Files BitTorrent-style [NewTeeVee]
© 2009 The GigaOM Network. Marketing consulting by ACS.
Liz, excellent catch. I hope you hear from the CW press folks.
when will they get it? post all episodic content, which most tv shows are, as video podcasts with advertising included if necessary. different ads, more ads, whatever. find an amount and method of advertising to include with/in the show that will pay the bills and just do it. i think there is a huge market of folks that would get into your programming if you made it easy for them to have it automatically delivered to their HDTV without having to pay first, via Apple TV or something similar. and doing this would actually deter the sharing of ad-free pirated copies cause it just wouldnt be worth it.
The last episode of season 2 of gossip girl is by far the best one to date.
Hope they can keep the quality up going into the 3rd season.
And as the spin off has bin canceled by the network they should concentrate on gossip girl :-)
i love this show and my day is not complete if i have not watched Gossip Girl. Blake Lively is certainly the most beautiful actress on Gossip Girl.
Gossip Girl is the best TV Series for me. every teenage girl love this TV Series.
Gossip Girl is probably one of the sexiest TV Show. you have the very beautiful Blake Lively and of course Leighton Meester
Gossip Girl is may favorite show and my favorite actress is of course Blake Lively. she is very beautiful