TVloop Blog

This one comes to you courtesy of James Hibberd’s blog The Live Feed.  Evidently ABC suits have realized that they’re confusing the hell out of everyone with the unending number of plot twists.  So rather than rely on recaps and pop-up bubbles, ABC has launched a new feature called Lost Untangled.

If you can stand the absurdity of watching a guy manipulate action figures and cardboard cutouts while doing a not-so-great voice over, Lost Untangled actually does a decent job of summarizing the last episode into less than five minutes.  Enjoy.

And not to miss a chance to share some stats, here’s a graph from AppData that shows the monthly active users for the TVLoop Addicted to Lost application on Facebook.  As you can see, Lost numbers are up dramatically since the first of the year, and even more so since the season premiere in mid-January.  Things are starting to flatten out a little though, so it will be interesting to see how the Lost application performs as the season progresses.

The list of celebrity Scientologists is known and long.  Tom Cruise, Issac Hayes, John Travolta. Bart Simpson?

Nancy Cartwright is the voice of Bart Simpson, that lovable scamp at the heart of one of the biggest shows on our network, The Simpsons.  Apparently, she is also a Scientologist. She recently used her voice, as well as the popular characters, on a robocall to promote her being featured in a conference for Scientology. While it is clearly within her right to use her own voice, the use of the voice and name of Bart Simpson is much trickier territory.  Rather than making a judgement of our own, we turned to Facebook and the TVLoop community’s Addicted to The Simpsons application to get fan reaction.

With ~2500 votes, The Simpsons fans have responded…and they are not happy. While 7% thought the move was OK, and 18% thought that it was up to Cartwright, over two-thirds of the fans (67%) voted with “Hell no, she shouldn’t have done it.”

The overwhelmingly negative reaction to this move is not confined to our users alone. Danny Gallagher at TV Squad had a similar reaction, when he says about Scientologists, “they have either grown too powerful or have completely lost whatever grip they had left on reality, which wasn’t a whole hell of a lot to begin with.”

While most of the users who left comments on the poll were somewhere between angry and disappointed with Cartwright, a few had a more moderate view. One user mused, “I think it’s reasonable in the sense that I’m not bothered by members of the Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist and generally all faiths being allowed to promote their faiths. To discriminate against any one faith is unjust, whether or not you agree with what’s being said she is still entitled to say it so long as she has the legal right to.”

One lesson to take away from all of this is a reinforcement of the old adage, “no news is bad news.”  Before this particular poll, our largest in the community only garnered 244 votes.  It just goes to show, sometimes, even when you ask them not to, people will have a cow.

InteractiveTV Today is a great news source for the emerging medium of multiplatform, broadband interactive television, and consists of a newsletter and radio show among other things.  The radio shows is streamed lived on BlogTalkRadio and is hosted by ITVT owner, Tracy Swedlow.  Today Tracy conducted a great, hour-long interview with Watercooler CEO, Kevin Chou.

It’s a great listen and Kevin goes into a ton of detail about Watercooler’s business as well as the how the TVLoop communities are faring across the various social networking applications as well as TVLoop.com.  Here are just a few of the things Kevin covers:

• Video partnerships with ABC, Hulu and Joost
• State of the TV industry from a web perspective
• TVLoop community and member engagement activities
• Engaging social media advertising beyond standard display ads
• SmithGeiger partnership and alternative revenue plans

So if you’ve ever wanted to get a great sense of what makes Watercooler tick, you should definitely check out the interview below.

Here’s a look at the top ten TVLoop TV fan communities from the week ending January 31.  There were definitely some interesting changes compared to the previous week.

The L Word took over the top spot from Lost, and keeps driving big growth for a relatively small, scripted cable show.  Fans continue to embrace the new season, and the community has held down a spot in the top five for the last 2-3 months.

New this week in the Top Ten are Rescue Me and Family Guy which replace One Tree Hill and Scrubs.  While Rescue Me isn’t slated to air its 2009 premiere until April, fans are already jumping on board with a massive 16% growth in one week.   I generally only include on-air shows in this list, but I thought that kind of excitement warranted placement.

It’s interesting to see Scrubs drop off the list as ratings have been down in their first season on ABC, and now there are rumors that this will indeed be the last season.  With that hanging over it’s head, it should be interesting to see how the rest of its 2009 season plays out.

If you believe Scrubs creator, Bill Lawrence, this season will be the first for Scrubs on ABC, but the last for new episodes.  Lawrence recently recently spoke to a group of students at College of William and Mary, and told them that he and Zach Braff are through after this season.

It may not be too surprising after looking at the ratings.  If I’m reading the Nielsen data correctly, and there’s no guarantee in that since it takes a PhD in statistics to make sense of this stuff, it looks like Scrubs got crushed in its time slot this past week. The show finished dead last among the big four networks by a long shot behind The Mentalist, The Biggest Loser: Couples, and Fringe.

I also took a quick look at what Scrubs is doing in the TVLoop community.  While there is some slight growth, monthly active users are pretty much stagnant which is very surprising for a popular show coming back from hiatus.  If this is the type of fan support being generated, maybe it’s a good idea to call it quits while Zach and company still have their dignity.