ABC site buckles as network streams first ad-supported shows

“ABC’s Web site crashed twice yesterday as Internet users flocked to watch streaming versions of its most popular shows, including ‘Lost’ and ‘Desperate Housewives.’ It was the first time the shows were available online directly from the network, and the first time the advertising community had gotten a look at what ad products would be offered. It was also the first opportunity for the industry to gauge how popular such an ad-supported offering might be with consumers,” Zachary Rodgers reports for ClickZ News.

“The site crashed for two periods beginning at 6:30 a.m. EST and 2:00 p.m. EST, according to data from Keynote Systems, which offers traffic and site performance analysis services. The outages lasted a half-hour and an hour-and-a-half each, respectively. The data was based on attempts to access the ABC site from 31 cities worldwide. ‘During the day today, there were some very pronounced increases in page download times followed by Web page outages,’ said Abelardo Gonzalez, a product manager for Keynote Systems. ‘The main error reported by the ABC home page was TCP Connection Error which could mean that the servers were not able to answer any new requests for users.’ An ABC spokesperson contacted by ClickZ said she was unaware of the outages.”

Full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Scott Rose of www.computergeekshow.com” for the heads up.]

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Related articles:
Apple iTunes Store adds ‘Season Pass’ option for ABC TV shows ‘Desperate Housewives’ and ‘Lost’ – March 28, 2006
Disney’s ABC to launch ‘My ABC’ ad-supported TV show downloads in May – March 03, 2006

22 Comments

  1. I wonder why they haven’t made them available on iTunes with the adverts for free? I suppose then it’s a question of splitting the ad revenue both in terms of hosting and Apple will want to make something on the deal. Would be interesting if they offered them as podcasts though – which seems a perfect way of doing it and they could still host it etc.

  2. Great idea from ABC (Steve Jobs is on the Board of Directors of parent company Disney).
    The Flash streaming video is great.
    Did you know that more computers have Flash installed than QuickTime?

    Flash is the future for online streaming of video. Flash is owned by Adobe.
    With Flash this gives the producer much more options….including interactivity.

    This is not good news for Apple iTunes…

  3. Al Gore is currently inventing environmental awareness and a reason why he should run against Hillary in 2008.

    Ever seen Al photographed with any Apple products? The guy is an Apple board member.

  4. I noticed that about the choppy video when you’re doing other things too. That’s too bad. The video was really good quality but about 15 minutes into Alias it locked up on me. That’s OK, they’ll work it out. This might be the beginning of a new paradigm shift in television. I hope so. Once they work the kinks out it’ll be awesome.

  5. oh man! fantastic! I went to ABC to watch free videos, then realized, they probably logged my IP, gave me a cookie, and if I right click on the Flash video, it asks me if I want to allow ABC.com access to my – camera and microphone ?!? huh ? too many privacy concerns ! if I ever watch
    tv, which I don’t, I’ll still feel safer going through Apple ITMS.

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