NBC. Panic! Panic!

Poor, poor NBC. First they screw up their digital distribution strategy and start running around making all sorts of fuss and noise and not really accomplishing much. Now after the start of their big premiers it seems they are panicking some more, who though it’d be possible?

Monday was very disappointing for NBC. All three shows didn’t do terribly, but didn’t do particularly well either. Chuck and Journeyman both did much worse than the premiers in the same slots last year. Heroes, was the winner in it’s slot but had the same size audience as it’s debut last year. Not surprising after Heroes’ dismal finale last season. So now? They’re putting both Chuck and Journeyman (although not Heroes) back on the iTunes Music Store. Seriously. Despite the 3 other directions they’ve got at their disposal (NBC Direct, Amazon Unbox and Hulu) they’ve gone back to the only for pay digital distribution system that has any reasonable audience.

They’ll still be over by the December NBC/iTMS deadline so nothing has officially changed. But really, it just goes to show that despite the strong language between Apple and NBC they both need each other to succeed at this point and now they both know it.

As a side note, you know what’s crazy? Nielsen has a clause where if you play the same show with the same commercials you can add up all the viewership numbers for that clause. Um, what? So basically you can kind of double your viewership numbers and for some reason Nielsen digs that and more surprisingly so do advertisers, it’s all about the lies everyone agrees to believe. NBC seems to be trying to invoke that clause with the Heroes premier and they’re going to re-air it on Saturday night. Jeez.

Sep 26th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: apple · tv