In yet another attempt to promote the company's content through MySpace, News Corp announced today that they'll air the premiere of spoiled rich-kid drama "The O.C." on MySpace and Fox sites a week before it appears on TV. Showing a flagrant disregard for bandwidth concerns, they'll be offering the entire one-hour show beginning on October 26th. You will, however, need to download the Fox Full Throttle player from their Fox on Demand pages.
There are some pretty big limitations with this player that make the content a lot less useful: the inability to skip ads is reasonable, but the software is Windows only, and I've been inundated with complaints over on MySpace from users who can't download the player, receive errors, can't see the picture and so on. That's not surprising for a MySpace product, but it's a problem they need to address. A Mac-compatible player is planned, and make the software available to more users.
News Corp is experimenting a great deal with TV content on MySpace: in September, for instance, they ran previews of The Simpsons on the site (see Simpsons-MySpace). What's more, the on-demand section and player were launched in October, with shows including “Prison Break”, “Justice”, “Standoff”, “Vanished” and “Bones”. Each of these shows has its own MySpace page where the shows are cross-promoted and users can add them to their friends. But the biggest step - letting users comment on individual episodes - doesn't seem to have been taken. That would realize the interactive benefits of the online medium, rather than just pushing more TV content to people on a smaller screen. This social element makes YouTube and MySpace Video far more compelling, but it seems these features are forgotten about when it comes to full-length TV content.
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