Sony (SNE) To Launch New Show Online, Alienate Customers

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 16, 4:49AM EDT

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Sony (SNE) is about to launch it new "Angel of Death" program online. It hopes the trick will get people to buy the DVD of the show down the road. Content companies now release this kind of programming without putting it on to TV or into theaters. The "junk" content makes more money that way. It is cheap to produce and would not hold up the the tastes of people who go to the movies to see "Shrek III".

The launch has one flaw, and perhaps a fatal one. According to The Wall Street Journal, "The series will be released online eight minutes at a time, over 10 weeks, on various Sony-affiliated Web sites." Of course, consumers are anxious to go back to their PCs ten times to see a program which was not worthy of theater release.

Sony’s move is an example of how not to use the internet. It is not a medium for promotion gimmicks. Online media consumers can get too much YouTube and premium content for free. NBC releases many of its TV shows gratis for online viewing, as do other large media companies.

Asking people to watch programming ten minutes at time is like asking them to put burning sticks into their eyes.

There are a lot of takers for that one.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.