Their Featured Foxcast of the week, for the new, much-buzzed-about series Prison Break, is a hopeful sign that they may be expanding the scope of these podcasts. With interviews of the cast and sound bites from the show, this is the kind of content that will get fans excited.
Another strike against the Fox attempt is that the podcasts are on a stand-alone page linked from the main Fox site, but not from the show-specific sites, where fans desperate to fill their iPods would have another opportunity to stumble across them.
Still, the baby steps shown by Fox and decent strides by NBC and CBS are likely to lead to improved TV podcasting initiatives in the future. At least, I hope they will, as networks explore more ways to break television free from the box, and better leverage the Internet to add entertainment value to consumers and marketing value to themselves. Though recent research shows young Canadians are spending more time on the Internet than watching TV (see Ipsos Reid), the Internet can be as much an opportunity as a threat to the industry.
(For more on my opinion of television's too-little, too-late attempts to harness the Internet, check out Unified Theory of Nothing Much)
Article comments
1 - Eric Berlin
Amazing job on covering this important story, deekay! Podcasting was on the brink for a while, and now I think we're seeing majoy media cross- and spill-over.
And if no one else has done it... welcome!
2 - Warren
Sci-Fi has also been podcasting the director's commentary for Battlestar Galactica since almost the beginning.
I think that cable TV is probably going to be quicker to make use of podcasting than the networks are. They seem to be more willing to change and innovate.
3 - deekay
Thanks Eric! It's good to be here. Warren, I don't know that any network is really on the cutting edge of TV podcasts, cable or not, though most are starting to make use of them. It'll be exciting to see what happens.
4 - Hopesome
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5 - Sebastien Chorney
A very interesting discussion.
Our company has produced 13 music-themed podcasts to coincide with the premiere of season 1 of the TV series ReGenesis on Global Televison in Canada.
Front-of-mind for us was creating something entertaining and of value to both fans and casual viewers of the show, incorporating more than plot summaries and short soundbites.
You can listen to the podcasts at www.regenesispodcast.com and feel free to drop me a line with your comments at info at podzapper dot com.
6 - deekay
That's pretty cool, Sebastian. Quite different from what some of the other networks are going for. It's very subtle in terms of marketing - purely a focus on the music, so you don't even have to know the show to appreciate them (and I'm apparently a bad Canadian, since I'd never heard of it). It does seem like a no-brainer, to use podcasts to highlight the music from an episode.