popular thinking

WATCH THE SUPER BOWL ADS ONLINE INSTEAD

If your only reason to watch tonight’s Super Bowl was to see the ads, don’t bother.
America Online already has six of the $2.5 million, 30-second TV spots online.
As for the rest? Keep checking at ifilm.com, where “they’re essentially available within minutes” of their first airing, said Roger Jackson, iFilm.com’s vice president of content and programming.
Must-see TV no longer needs to be seen on TV anymore - you can see it online.
Did you miss Isaac Mizrahi’s groping of Scarlett Johansson at the Golden Globes? Want to watch Tom Cruise jump on Oprah’s couch again and again?
Click on iFilm.com to see it all.
“We have to be rather circumspect about what we put online,” Jackson said. “We don’t want to be recycling television shows that we don’t have the rights to.”
But if something outrageous or unexpected happens during a show, it’ll get posted online.
When David Letterman verbally sparred with Bill O’Reilly recently on “The Late Show with David Letterman,” both Letterman and O’Reilly had footage available on their sites the next day.
The “Lazy Sunday” video from “Saturday Night Live” became a sensation not because people saw it on TV, but because someone posted the video online at YouTube the next day, where millions more watched it.
Spencer Sloan, the Atlanta-based blogger behind goldenfiddle.com, has uploaded five TV clips to YouTube in the past month.
“After throwing us over 60 years, we’ve finally broken TV and saddled it with TiVo,” Sloan said. “Sites like YouTube and iFilm are just the next logical step in video wrangling, considering we’re now in front of the computer 24 hours a day, anyway.”
Broadcasters are starting to figure that out.
When Jon Stewart went on CNN in 2004 to chastise “Crossfire,” plenty of sites offered the video footage, but not CNN. Cut to December 2005, when CNN launched Pipeline, an on-demand subscription video service with multiple live streams and archival access.
MTV Networks acquired iFilm.com last fall. Last month, it launched “Web Junk 20” on VH1, showcasing 20 outrageous online clips each week.
“When you can link a similar experience across several platforms you get more traction,” said Brian Graden, president of entertainment for MTV Networks. “The audience builds exponentially.”
UPN made news last fall when it put entire episodes of “Everybody Hates Chris” on Google Video for free, “which I think was brilliant,” Graden said. “The more noise you can make, the more it helps television in the short run.”
“Web Junk 20” host Patrice Oneal said he already has seen most of his show’s clips, such as New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s recent speech calling for “a chocolate New Orleans.”
“Guys like me, they stay away from the Internet like the plague,” Oneal said. “But then they see this, and they get addicted to it.”

NOTE: I'll have opinions and links for the Super Bowl ads tonight.