Survey Says! V to Stream Four Days After Airing
I missed the first episode of the V last night and forgot to DVR it. “No big deal,” I thought, “I’ll catch it on Hulu tomorrow.”
Unh-unh. No such luck, my friend. V is not available on either Hulu or ABC.com today. The pilot is, however, available for free on electronic sell-through sites Amazon VOD and iTunes (hat tip to TV by the Numbers).
Instead of the full episode, ABC.com greeted me with a survey that asked a bunch of questions relating to online video and release windows for content. Screengrabs below but a good example is: “Given a choice, would you rather watch future V episodes online or on TV?”
It looks like episodes of V won’t be available online until four days after they air on TV (but, they will have fancy social TV functionality). Overall, ABC is obviously trying to gauge the viewing behavior of its audience, which, for a show like V is probably a tech-savvy one.
All the networks are coping with changing TV viewing habits, so it’s no surprise ABC is is asking some straightforward questions. We’re just wondering what took them so long. Here are some questions from the survey:
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You can watch TV series in streaming (usually next day after they air on TV) on sidereel.com
Here’s the V episode
http://www.sidereel.com/V_%28Reimagined_Series%29
This seems short sighted to me. They obviously want to encourage viewers to make an appointment to see it on TV, but that’s not why internet content is appealing. It’s the instant nature, no schedule just whatever you want when you want it. If viewers know that it will take 4 days to come to the net, a large percentage of them won’t wait and will pirate it instead. Hulu was supposed to be an answer to piracy, yet they keep creating demand for the pirates by putting unnecessary restrictions in place. In the end, if they drive an equal number of people to illegitimate copies then they do to new ads on TV, then they’ve still lost heavily. If they were really serious about this issue, they would have put “stream it on a tube site” instead as one of the answers in the survey.