Hooray, I get to save $1.99 a week:
Walt Disney Co.'s ABC Television will offer some of its most popular shows, such as "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost," for free on the Internet in a two-month trial, the company said Monday.
Expect other networks to follow suit, if they haven't done so already. The business model isn't a million miles removed from what they've been doing since time immemorial:
Advertising revenue will support the trial run on ABC.com, with advertisers AT&T Inc. (Research), Ford Motor Co. (Research), Procter & Gamble Co. (Research) and Universal Pictures already signed up.
"Commander in Chief" and "Alias" along with "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" will be available on the Web in May and June, starting the day after they are first broadcast.
Viewers will be able to pause and move between "chapters" in an episode but will not be able to skip embedded ads.
Doh! And for those keeping track of these things:
This year CBS' March Madness on Demand offering, live streams of games from the NCAA college basketball tournament, put live entertainment online.
And it was a big success.
According to figures from CBS SportsLine, the online sports news site of CBS, more than 1.3 million people signed up for the free service. These users visited the on-demand site about 5 million times during the first three weeks of the NCAA tournament and watched over 15 million live video streams.
By way of comparison, CBS SportsLine said that it had only between 20,000 and 25,000 users for a similar product during last year's tournament, when it charged $19.99.
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