The new series called Kidnapped is being shipped on DVD to Netflix customers nearly six weeks prior to its launch date on NBC. Certain Netflix customers received yesterday a DVD with the first episodes of NBC's Studio 60 and Kidnapped. The target audience of Netflix is without doubt an interesting audience to tap, "demographic rich" audience.
This is a trend setter of course, a bold and interesting move from NBC as well as being an interesting venture for Netflix.
In this article at MSNBC there is very insightful remark, NOT! :
This is either genius (will create buzz!) or stupid (who will watch on the actual premiere night?).
When you're talking about trends it seems a good idea to give your opinion rather than stating the obvious and sounding like a football commentator. The idea is to create buzz. What the journalist doesn't really seem to get here is that the buzz is about a tv show with a whole season of episodes. There is also a substantial gap between the availability of the DVD and the show's premiere ! This is something that may play against them since people seeing a preview might have gotten tired of waiting. It is common for people to see pilot episodes and vote for them in the US while it is pretty uncommon in Europe. However I remember having seen the pilot of the series 'Bones' well before the show started running and it wet my appetite for the then upcoming series.
I just watched Kidnapped and if the pilot is anything to go by then the show will be fantastic. While watching it I realised that more and more TV shows are playing on the whole sequel system that has been around in Films for a while. This pilot of Kidnapped was fast paced, with some great actors, nicely written script that gets you on the edge of your seat (or settee). I certainly can't wait to see the series when it starts near the end of September. To answer the journalist I'll be talking about it with friends and telling them how they should tune in and watch it on September 20th but I doubt I'll be watching the pilot again; result NBC has got me, free of charge, to do some PR work for them. I suppose it's you scratch my back...
The Hacking NetFlix blog has an interesting post on this subject :
"We're trying to create a viral community of evangelist fans for the shows so that they can create word of mouth," says John Miller, chief marketing officer of NBC Universal's TV group. "We took the shows that we thought were the most film- and theatrical-oriented."
The move may well be to stop iTunes from getting 82% of downloading videos. NBC is trying to build buzz by exploiting the trend of people watching TV shows on DVD !
