Gossip 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 fact, posted the season two premiere of Gossip Girl online. TVbytheNumbers‘ Robert Seidman kept his eyes on CWTV and let us know he caught sight of last week’s episode posted yesterday afternoon, a few hours before the new one aired on the East Coast.

So it appears, for now, that the CW’s new strategy is to post streaming versions of its primetime shows a week after they air (Gossip Girl is on Mondays). In keeping with that schedule, the series premiere of the new 90210 (which aired last Tuesday) is live today. I believe that, in the past, CW posted new episodes after a couple days’ delay, but not a week. All along it has been posted to iTunes with much more alacrity.

This new posting schedule follows the network’s attempt to drive up oldteevee viewership of Gossip Girl last year by discontinuing ad-supported streaming of new episodes. Over the summer the network announced it had changed its policy and would be bring the show back to the web, but when no new episodes had appeared six days after the season premiere we had started to wonder if it was having second thoughts.

So now we know. A week, though? Are you trying to drive up TiVo sales or something?