PriceSCAN Blog

Further, the ads (three of them, all from the same advertiser), may take the form of an interactive game. This raises the possibility of the viewer as lab rat – navigate the maze of this little game and you can have the cheese that is "Desperate Housewives". Sort of a Marshal McLuhan meets B.F. Skinner thing. And ABC intends to set up online chat rooms where viewers can share their thoughts on the edifying experience that is primetime television. Will these chats be monitored, I wonder? Then they'd have a Margaret Mead angle as well ("fascinating to watch them socialize, isn't it, Doctor?"). Not that there aren't scores of such sites around as it is, which makes you wonder just how much free time the average American really does have on his or her hands.
Now having a season available on demand does have its advantages, but then many cable services provide this service for the offerings of HBO, Showtime and the like, and without making you a part of their Orwellian experiment. Over all, there's something kind of familiar about all this, kind of like the rather lame movie download schemes Hollywood has bee proposing of late (see "Hollywood's Download Model: Less Content, Less Versatility, Higher Cost"). Sooner or later, I suspect the media conglomerates will have to learn to embrace the web's strengths, rather than continuously attempting to use it to turn back time and take back advantages long offered by older technologies.