Day: March 2, 2010

Brian Stelter at the New York Times just reported on the news that Viacom and Comedy Central have decided to pull online streaming of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report from Hulu. This means a lot to Hulu. But what does it matter to you where you watch these shows, if you watch them online and can continue to do so on the network's home pages? And as my Canadian, European and Australian fans (and readers elsewhere, too) always are quick to remind me, Hulu's free service isn't available outside of the United States, anyhow. Stelter's piece notes that this is the first big "fracture" between the networks and Hulu, although Hulu recently picked up a big prize in ABC's programming — especially considering ABC's own proprietary media player is not fun to use. It does reveal, however, the continued difficulties in figuring out how to make enough revenue off of the free Internet. And with rumors abounding over the past several months that Hulu might try to institute fees of some sort or another, that's got to be resonate with casual viewers. Here's part of the note Hulu's Andy Forssell wrote on the company blog today: In the past 21 months, we‚Äôve had very strong results for both Hulu and Comedy Central, in terms of the views and revenue we‚Äôve generated, thanks to a...

A very strange thing happened on Sunday night. Jerry Seinfeld introduced a new show on NBC and virtually nobody seemed to like it! Wait. That's not strange. That happened before, when The Seinfeld Chronicles pilot appeared many summers ago, only to blossom into Seinfeld in the 1990s and make everyone think he invented the sitcom. But what about this "hybrid" of a show called The Marriage Ref? NBC short-circuited its coverage of the closing ceremonies for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver just to make sure we saw a half-hour preview of the series as scheduled at 10:30 p.m. Eastern/Pacific. And roughly 14.5 million people kept the channel on for the half-hour, which is a healthy amount of viewers these days, until you realize that even more people watched CBS at the same time to watch the boss of White Castle ruin his buns. That literally happened. More amazing was the instantly critical reaction to The Marriage Ref, as chronicled by Brian Stelter of the New York Times into insta-bad-buzz, and then today we've already got my former colleague David Hinckley at the New York Daily News trying to fix the show before its proper debut on Thursday. Can it be saved? Does it even need to be saved already? What I do know is this: Of the 607 people I follow currently on Twitter, only one person had anything...