ABC.com Offering Full Episodes of Desperate Housewives & Lost
With CBS partnering finding a partner in Google Video, then deciding to bypass Google Video by offering downloads of Survivor via their website, and then partnering with Yahoo to offer a web version of 60 Minutes, it’s time for other netowrks to step up with some broadband video on demand offerings.
And ABC has. Now ABC.com is planning on streaming advertising supported episodes of Lost and Desperate Housewives to their Internet audience for no charge.
Similar to the format currently being used on ESPN’s In Motion Web Video Specials, ABC.com’s features of Lost and Desperate Housewives will include commericals which will be immune to fast forwarding.
In order to view the free programming via your computer, you have to sit through the commericals.
Aaron Barnhart of the Kansas City Star notes that in a world of video iPods and behavioral targeted advertising, ABC.com is taking a rather simple approach:
ABC’s announcement is the latest sign that some popular TV shows will become available by every means possible on every device with a screen, be it a 2-inch video MP3 player, 17-inch PC monitor or wall-sized home theater system.
It comes at a time when you can also get video content, called “mobisodes,” on your cell phone, and programs developed exclusively for the Web that will never see the inside of your TV
What was striking about ABC’s Monday announcement was that, for a change, it wasn’t highlighting one of those sleek handheld devices. Instead, the star was the humble personal computer. Before the iPod came along, the PC was considered the major challenger to TV, because it had a large screen and hundreds of millions of models in use.
