Television stations now enjoy immense popularity on the internet as well, with every production house now showcasing its newest shows online—and it seems that loyal fans just can’t get enough of their favorite TV shows! The traffic on the Twentieth Century Fox website increased dramatically with the return of the hugely popular American Idol. Out of the more than four million visitors to the website last month, more than one million visited the American Idol page on the Fox site—and this despite the fact that Fox does not run any streaming videos of the shows online.
Thanks to all the offstage buzz about American Idol, fans can spend devoted hours reading about the show on the network’s website, or watching behind the scenes videos and shows on the making of the show. That’s certainly one way to keep audience interest maintained in a mainstream television show! American Idol has certainly taken reality shows to a completely different level with its high profile judges and the fact that it gives the lucky winners life-transforming opportunities to make breakthroughs into the American music industry. And, as the world knows, if you make it in America, you’ve really got it made!
American Idol has also made its presence keenly felt on the internet. Apart from the Fox website, there are several popular sites which are dedicated to this path breaking reality show. There are online radio stations, discussion forums, fan sites which post videos of the finalists on the show, spoofs and criticism of the program, self styled experts who try to predict the show’s winners, sites with recaps of every episode and archives of the winners and losers: you name it, it’s there on the internet!
Not to be overwhelmed by the unprecedented success of its phenomenally popular reality show, however, Fox is also gearing up for more popularity by capitalizing on the sensational popularity of its Terminator series. The stereotype defying machine hunter Sarah Connor made her small screen debut recently with the premier of a new series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Despite the buzz generated by the return of American Idol, however—not to mention its other popular shows—the Fox website is still not the most visited on the world wide web, although it did manage to outdo close rival CBS with the renewed popularity of American Idol. That privileged position is held by the ABC and NBC networks, both clocking in at approximately a whopping eight million people per month! Perhaps Fox could learn something from networks like NBC, which allows surfers to watch entire episodes of their favorite shows online, and also watch outrageous clips from some of the network’s most popular shows. ABC, of course, is currently happily riding the Lost wave, which makes it the most visited television network website in recent times. Thanks to these virtual extensions of television shows, maybe we can now safely arrive at the conclusion that the computer is the latest avatar of the ‘idiot’ box!
