Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Leonard to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday online media insights. Leo’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to communicate one’s passion.

No episode has been broadcasted yet on French TV channels, but it is already a success.

Heroes is the last blockbuster in TV series landscape. The first season just ended last week in the US, but it has not yet started in France (planned for this summer). I have been wondering for a long time why American TV series were taking so much time to be cross the sea. I now think it is part of a brilliant buzz marketing campaign.

I must admit that, as a series-addict, I couldn’t resist to take a tour to Youtube to corroborate all I read about this one (“a Marvel Comics with actors”). Since I saw the first episode, I have been promoting it all around me. I was quite surprised to see that, even though all episodes are available on the web (subtitled in French the day after it is broadcasted in the US), most of my friends were waiting to see them on French TV channels. They told me some reasons for this:

• Poor encoding quality
• Want to see it in French
• Prefer to see it on a TV than on their small laptop monitor
• Too complicated (not all of my friends are geeks!)

People watching TV series on the internet are early adopters (see Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations theory). They accept a certain level of service failure (not ideal broadcasting conditions), but can’t wait a year to see what’s hot overseas. More important, they are social leaders: their consumption habits will spread in their environment.

If TV series production companies were threatened by internet uncontrolled broadcasting, they would plan simultaneous broadcasting worldwide. This is not the case.

I think most of the readers of this blog can be categorized as early adopters. I would be curious to know how many of the TV series addicts reading these lines don’t watch them on the internet.

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