Mobisodes none too popular

16 October 2006 Rob Buckley UK TV 3 Comments

TardisodesApparently, those Doctor Who mobisodes (aka TARDISodes) were none too popular. Although 2.6 million people downloaded them onto their home computers, only 40,000 people watched them on their mobile phones.

Iain Tweedale, the new media editor for BBC Wales, points out that the pricing to download mobisodes – £1.50 to £2 – probably put a load of people off, particularly when all they had to do was watch them for free on their home computer. But I think there were a couple of other obvious problems:

  1. They were only a minute long and nothing happened in them really
  2. They didn’t feature either the Doctor or Rose.

So £2 to download something that wasn’t actually very interesting, £26 to download the whole season’s worth. You could get several DVDs for that price. I know which I’d rather watch.

Still, Lost is going to up the ante in the US with mobisodes that star the actual cast members, and Battlestar Galactica‘s webisodes already did more or less the same thing. So maybe next series’ will be better.

Author

  • Rob Buckley

    I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.

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