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As Expected, CW Realizes Gossip Girl Needs To Be Online
from the inevitability dept
You'll have to excuse the gloating, but, well: we told you so. Or Mike did, anyway, when back in April he explained why the CW Network's decision to stop streaming Gossip Girl on its website was completely boneheaded.
The executives behind the decision were trying to force the show's sizable online audience to watch the program on broadcast television instead. Unsurprisingly, the ploy didn't work, and yesterday the network's president confirmed that streaming will resume.
We should give credit where it's due: the network brass recognized their experiment's failure relatively quickly and called it off. And their original motivation is understandable -- online advertising continues to lack the financial firepower of traditional media ads due to a variety of factors, only some of which can be blamed on the ad industry's continued confusion over how to deal with the internet age.
But as Mike originally pointed out, this plan was doomed from the start. Limiting consumer choice is no longer a viable business strategy. Attempts to do so in the media realm are especially hopeless, and doubly so when, like the CW, you've already shown your users how much freedom they could be enjoying. Sure enough, the torrents for Gossip Girl are well-seeded. Given that, the CW's decision to serve its viewers on their own terms is a wise one. Here's hoping they do us all a favor and find a way to make their online ad stock more financially viable.
Tom Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tom Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.
Reader Comments (rss)
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You showed them. Now dance around like the immature 5 year that you are.
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wait, a corporation changed it's mind?
i didn't think that was possible. imposing limitations on customers is standard operating procedure... i didn't think it was possible for a corporation to see it was making a mistake and change course BEFORE failing miserably.
did they sue someone or get sued by someone?
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itunes
CW has the entire first season of Gossip Girl for sale on iTunes as well.
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Right...
Just admit it, the techdirt staff are all secretly gossip girl fanboys.
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Re: wait, a corporation changed it's mind?
So we gone from not being able to comperhend the stupidity of the RIAA/MPAA to disbelief that a corporation can actually correct their mistake before dying?
People sure have low expectation of what corporations are capable of.
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tankyo
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