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Mad Men Crashes To Low TV Figures – Does It Matter With Bittorrent Out There?

Mad Men has returned to UK screens, with a heavily trailed start to Season Two on BBC4. And the results were 240,000 (ish) viewers. That holds up pretty well to the Season One premiere that caught 270,000, A drop of 9% year on year is pretty respectable.

Whether the number of viewers is worth what the BBC paid for, I don’t know. But what I would love to know is how many people in the UK have caught Mad Men via ‘the dark corners of the internet.’ That’s a hard number to calculate (if only the TV industry had a central site they could get numbers from, like the original napster offered the music industry), but with episodes of Lost and Heroes reaching 1.5 million computers, then the problems of a smaller cable station or minority channel is clear.

I think that in the next three years we’re going to see a show break free from the networks and embrace online; sell a season pass for the fans, and finance the show that way. Maybe VC money from the bay needs to look in this direction. The season pass concept has been proven by Apple, the delights of Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Blog showed the concept of Hollywood writers doing an online show, now we just need (a) a spark to ignite everything and (b) enough fans to pre-buy a series so any piracy will have a minimal effect on production.

After all, the pilots are already going down the online route before terrestrial airing!

February 11, 2009; Mainstream Media, Web 2.0 (Observations);

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