Streaming through the television clutter

It looks as if television networks have embraced an idea that record companies still find difficult to accept: Giving away your product -- temporarily, anyway -- can be a great promotional tool.

In recent weeks, the season premieres of Showtime’s “Fat Actress” and Bravo’s “Project Greenlight” were made available for online viewing on the day of their television premieres and for a week thereafter.

In the month that the season premiere of Sci Fi’s “Battlestar Galactica” has been available for online streaming (i.e., viewing without permanently downloading), the episode has been accessed more than 150,000 times. “Fat Actress” was streamed by Yahoo users more than 175,000 times in the first two days that it was available, according to the market research firm comScore.

Last year, AOL kick-started the trend by putting entire episodes of “Everwood” and “Jack & Bobby” online; the latter debuted on AOL several weeks before it premiered on the WB and was streamed 700,000 times in one week by AOL members.

“Networks are more and more excited to take part in these types of promotions,” says Patricia Karpas, vice president and general manager of AOL Television, which gave “Project Greenlight” its online premiere March 15.

“They see it as a way to break out and break through the clutter.”

“People are getting used to watching longer things on their computers,” says Bob Greenblatt, president of entertainment at Showtime, which debuted “Fat Actress” on the network and on Yahoo on March 7. As a pay-cable network, Greenblatt says, Showtime wasn’t too concerned about online viewership cutting into ratings. Besides, the exposure the show got from being promoted on the site was invaluable.

“It doesn’t cost you the money it takes to put a DVD in a magazine,” which Showtime did last fall with “Huff,” Greenblatt says. “But we needed people to be able to see this show, to get a sense of what it was, in order to get them to a much more exhaustive process, which is making a purchase” of a subscription to Showtime.

“You don’t get a show’s content in a 30-second [commercial] spot,” says Jason Klarman, senior vice president of marketing at Bravo, which streamed an episode of “Queer Eye for the Straight Girl” on AOL in January. “If you believe the content is good, and we believe it is, there’s no better marketing vehicle” than the show itself.

But putting a program online should be part of a larger online strategy and marketing plan, executives say.

“What you really try to do when you create these experiences is not only air the full episode, you give people the opportunity to write a review or go on the message boards or sign up for alerts,” AOL’s Karpas says.

Building online buzz by putting full episodes online has become such a hot marketing tool that there’s speculation the BBC was behind the recent “unauthorized” online release of an episode of its new “Dr. Who” series. But the BBC denied to Wired News that an in-house “viral marketing” plan was responsible for the show’s premature online debut.