Pulling ‘Modern Family’ from the Web Would be Silly
Ryan Lawler at NewTeeVee reports that Modern Family producer Steve Levitan is lobbying ABC to remove episodes of his sitcom from the Web as an experiment to see if it would improve TV ratings. I’m all for experiments. Experiments are great. The test tube industry would be struggling without them! But this particular experiment strikes me as silly for a few reasons.
Reason that this is silly number one: It didn’t work in 2008. Season one of The CW’s Gossop Girl premiered at 3.5 million viewers and averaged 2.5 million for the rest of the season. Before the show’s season two premiere, The CW announced that it was pulling the show’s stream-for-free full episodes from TheCW.com in an effort to improve on-air numbers. It didn’t. Season two premiered at 2.4 million viewers and the show reappeared online five episodes later. If it didn’t work in 2008, it likely won’t work in 2010.
Reason that this is silly number two: Some of the audience wants to watch online. These COMPUTER NERDS are probably some of the show’s most vocal promoters: tweeting quotes from the show, posting clips to Facebook, and writing self-indulgent know-it-all blog posts. And if media check-in services like Miso and Tunerfish start to gain traction, these will be the folks shilling for the show first. Make it easy for them to watch and be nice to them, fercrissakes.
Reason that this is silly number three: What actionable information could be unearthed from this experiment? If the numbers don’t change, Modern Family will return to Hulu and ABC.com and all will be as it is now. But what if the numbers do improve? Will ABC permanently pull the show from those outlets? If eMarketer’s prediction that 72% of internet users will be watching full-length TV shows online (that number is 59% this year) is correct, that move would win ABC a gold medal in the Myopia Olympics. And those aren’t even real.
I realize that this is the obvious stuff from someone like me: “Levitan is old school, a Luddite who doesn’t get that New Media is coming to gobble up broadcast and cable.” But I do understand where he’s coming from. Hollywood’s key performance indicators have been virtually the same for decades and have only just begun to include time-shifted viewing; online metrics will take another few years. The real money still comes from on-air ad revenue and cable carriage fees, both of which rely on big viewership numbers. But there are plenty of ways to improve those numbers (some may even argue that leveraging the Internet is one of them) and removing your programming from the venues where an influential and rapidly growing part of your fan base wants to watch is just silly.
