Amazon Unbox + NBCU Fall Season + Free Previews = Fantastic!
This morning, shopping online for an external hard drive, I visited Amazon where my eye was caught by a fantastic promotion: Through Amazon Unbox, NBC is giving away several pilots for its new fall season for free, including the much ballyhooed “Bionic Woman” as well as “Journeyman,” “Chuck” and more. I immediately downloaded the three I just listed and may go back for more.
Note that they aren’t to be broadcast until 9/24 or later, so this is an advance sneak peak. Kudos to NBC for this. I’ll try to view, review and blog about Bionic Woman soon, and maybe the others.
This marks a brave departure: the network isn’t just giving away the episodes to critics but to consumers. They’re clearly hoping that what Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper call “the swarm” (I’m reading their “Coolhunting” book right now) will embrace these series in spite of whatever the critics say, positive or negative.
By the way, here’s the fantastic thing about Amazon Unbox: if you have a Series 2 or above TiVo connected to your home high-speed network, then you can download programming directly to your TiVo box and watch it in your living room rather than on your laptop. Ordinarily, it costs the same as an iTunes TV purchase.
Does this close the last 10 feet problem of getting the content you love on your computer to your bigscreen TV? No. Is it a really nice workaround? Oh yes.
For a terrific discussion of how cludgy convergence is in the present day and age, go read the introduction to Henry Jenkins’ “Convergence Culture” or check out his blog.
I’m psyched about this.
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