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New Red Dwarf Series Threatened By the Twitter Era
An anonymous reader writes "The announcement that the new series of Red Dwarf is likely to be shot in front of a studio audience, which hasn't happened for the show since 1998, has made one of the show's actors wary of the practicality of it. Commenting on his blog, Robert Llewellyn, who plays servile robot Kryten in the hit British SF comedy show notes: 'The fear among the producers now is that it's impossible to imagine an audience of around 400 people at the recording of a TV show like Red Dwarf, where nobody does a bit of a hint on Twitter, or sneaks a picture on Facebook or posts a bit of badly shot video on YouTube.'"
All Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube posts will do is generate extra hype for the show at no extra cost to the producers. No one is going to watch a shitty YouTube cell phone capture instead of the actual show. Free advertising is always good and word of mouth is extremely valuable. If someone sees a commercial for a TV show they just file that away with all the other advertising they ignore. If they get the pitch from someone they know or better someone with similar interests they're way more likely to pay attention. If I was making a TV show I'd beg my audience to talk about it on every channel they had available.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The WWF (now WWE) has had to deal with this for ages, as their shows are often broadcast days after they're actually performed.
Their solution? Do jack shit.
The fans who don't want to be spoiled, don't look up the spoilers.
The fans who do, do.
Nobody really loses out unless someone on the cast has an unexplained need for secrecy. This isn't Survivor.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
The types of people that will read about the episodes on twitter or watch terrible videos from the audiance on youtube are the same types of people that will watch an episode 15x so they can come to work and annoy me with sad quotes. Then they'll buy your show on DVD, the "Editors edition" DVD, the "Extended cuts" DVD and then the box set.
I always thought viral marketing was a good thing?