Am I Less of a “Fan” For Watching TV Online?

I’m not going to lie to you, ever since Hulu entered my life two and half years ago it really has changed the way I watch television.  But is that a good thing or a bad thing?

To start with, I don’t have a DVR, and don’t plan on buying one any time soon.  Before Hulu (and the few other various online TV streaming sites) if I wanted to watch a show I had maybe three options.  Firstly, the most obvious, watch the thing when it airs!  Second, buy the DVD set.  Third, just record it via video tape, which these days is something I rarely do.

For the most part, though, I would simply watch the shows live as often as I could.  It was around six or seven years ago that I discovered TV on DVD, something fairly new to the world then.  As soon as I realized that I could buy up my old favorite TV shows that I used to love so much, I began to do so at an alarming rate.  There were hits and misses, though.  Shows I remember adoring as a kid no longer translated as well as they once did.  Take Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark? For a young kid it was nothing short of genius.  A new scary story every Saturday night?  Of course I was in love.  Years later, however, re-watching those episodes on DVD… wow, it doesn’t even seem like the same show.  Many of you probably understand what I’m talking about.

But I digress…

TV on DVD, for all the good it did, opened another door that Hulu would one day sink it’s teeth into completely.  It allowed me the viewer the chance to catch up on a show that I hadn’t been following as much as I would have liked.  And taking that a step further, it also allowed me to pick and choose what TV shows I wanted to watch live on the air, and what ones I would come back to once they were released on DVD.

Now, keeping all of that in mind, what I’m driving at here is the fact that most, if not all, TV shows today still live and die by the Nielsen Ratings system.  It’s because of the Nielsen ratings that good shows (*cough*Firefly *cough*) die prematurely, and bad shows seem to go on forever.  To be fair this is, for the majority, not always the case… but when it hits it hits hard.

The Nielsen Ratings DO count DVR and online viewing numbers, yes, but they don’t really hold a lot of ground for TV networks.  For the most part, what makes live viewing so important to networks is the amount of advertising they can put in for commercial breaks.  Online sites like Hulu pretty much promote themselves with the fact that they have limited commercials.  But it’s the advertisements, you see, that allow the studios to make most of their money back for funding the shows themselves.  If no one is watching live viewings, studios thus lose money with advertisers and, ipso facto, lose money with the show.  Even before when I was just buying the DVDs I was at least still putting a decent bit of money in someones pocket for each season I bought.

I bring all of this up because recently a much-loved show of mine was canceled.  It’s ratings weren’t stellar yet it had some of the highest DVR and online views around (readers of this blog — if there are any — know exactly what show I’m speaking of).  What does this say about the fans?

Currently I’m digging on SyFy’s new baby Warehouse13 which I find a very charming show so far.  However, I have never seen any of its four episodes live — I’ve viewed every one of them on Hulu.  Does this make me less of a fan than someone who did watch the show live (at least as far as the advertisements go)?

To my defense, though, I do not own a Nielsen box and have never known anyone who has — apparently only a select few have them and they are the ones where Nielsen gets the majority of their information.  I did, however, receive a phone call from Nielsen once asking if I would keep one of their week-long diaries of everything I watched on TV and when.  I agreed and was sent the packet a few weeks later along with $30 in cash — I happily filled out the diary for a week and mailed it back when I was done.  How that gets counted, though, I’ll never know.

But on the subject of this article, my opinion is that no, online viewings makes me no less a fan than the viewers who watch it live.  The aforementioned show that was canceled was, save for perhaps two episodes, a show that I MADE time to watch every week, yet it still got the ax.  Further, there was another new show I watched almost exclusively via Hulu that didn’t have great live ratings either yet it was renewed. (FYI, I also plan to buy the DVD sets for both shows when they are released.)

I could even make the argument that Hulu has made me become a fan of other TV shows that I would have never in a million years believed I’d have liked.  Case in point, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Never watched it when it was on the air originally.  Never cared to.  Not even after it was gone.  Yet through Hulu I watched the first couple of episodes, was intrigued, continued watching, and soon fell in love, eventually going out and buying the entire DVD collection!

But to stay on subject and, again, to be fair I must return to the previously stated fact that most shows live and die by Nielsen.  And they will continue to do so for a long while to come.

So what are your thoughts?  Are you a “fan,” or are you a FAN(!)?