A few weeks ago I talked about how Brett’s Special Fancy (the internet proxy and not the biscuit) didn’t really work so well anymore and how there was a new option.

It took me a while to hunt through my notes and find what I was talking about but here is a tutorial about using proxy system Hotspot Shield to view Hulu and it may also work for other sites.

Let us know in the comments if this works for you or if you have other ways around this problem.

via Tinkernut

Mia Cross has started to Twitter. That’s right. The fictional, plagiarising Lolita from Californication is now also pretending to be a real person in the lead-up to the new series of the show that disappointed everybody with its final episode.

Showtime, the cable network in the US that produces Californication has been using viral marketing on the web quite well for some of their programmes. Most notable is the video/SMS campaign for the second season of Dexter.

The thing is, Mia Cross is totally the kind of character who would start on Twitter because their agent thought it was a good and quick way to get a profile without them even understanding the concept of the community or how it works.

Meanwhile, Lost’s ?ber-invasive conspiracy body, The Dharma Initiative, has been seeking and testing new recruits. Fans of Lost, me included, are excited to get an insight into the organisation that harnessed the magical island’s magnetic energy and ran tests on humans and animals alike. Actually, some of us, me included, are excited just to get a Dharma Initiative ID card.

The question that comes to mind, though, is what are the marketing people thinking this does for a show? Will it build audience directly? Will it strengthen the brand in a viewer’s mind so that he or she becomes an evangalist for the programme? Or is it just throwing crap at a wall and hoping it sticks?

In derr Freddy (and I don’t know how we missed it) news, AllyourTV.com’s Rick Ellis interviews a studio employee about why he leaked the pilot of Pushing Daisies.

Read about it here.

(via TorrentFreak)

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UPDATE:
Whoops. Thanks to fourthof5 for pointing out that the link was wrong. I’ve fixed that now.

Don’t you wish, when you write a comment on a post, that you didn’t have to go back to the page to see if anyone has replied to your comment. Well dream no more, my Boxcutting siblings.

When you write a comment, you’ll see a subtle checkbox underneath the comments area which allows you to ‘Notify me of followup comments via e-mail’. To receive an email whenever someone adds to the comments on a post you’ve contributed to, just click the checkbox before hitting the Post button.

Once you have an updater set, you’ll see a link to manage your subscriptions and your email details where the messages get sent.

Enjoy!

Recent changes to parts of the blog that you don’t usually see (people in the know might call it the back-end) have meant that our RSS feeds have changed.

You can now find the blog feed at http://boxcutters.net/blog/index.php/feed/.

The comments feed is at http://boxcutters.net/blog/index.php/comments/feed/.

Sorry for the confusion.

Just a quick housekeeping update…

I’ve just upgraded the WordPress install to 2.0.10 – from 2.0.4 (who knew if you didn’t pay attention for a couple of weeks they’d release 6 new upgrades?) – but I don’t think there should be too much difference for readers. If anyone has a problem, let us know on the usual email. I think I’ve updated the permissions for all the right directories that need it but I may have missed something – hey, it’s happened before.

The other thing is that I’ve adjusted a setting in the admin section so we shouldn’t be seeing any more pingbacks in the comments sections. Mostly they were spam anyways – with a few in just the last few days so maybe we’d popped up on the radar for those pingback comment spamming arseholes – so there should be very little loss there.

That is all.

BB

A couple of weeks ago I talked about the This American Life.

You can find a rundown of the episodes here.

Also, I can highly recommend checking out the podcast. It’s one of the greatest things I’ve ever heard.

While we took our one week break, and probably to keep up with their self-imposed February deadline, Channel 10 launched their new and much anticipated website. I wanted to mention this on the show this week but we ran out of time.

The short review would be “same shit, different shape” but I thought I’d take this time to look at and compare the websites of all three commercial networks.

I’m basing my comments here on the sites www.seven.com, www.nine.com.au and www.ten.com.au

Firstly, let’s talk about what you want from a network’s website. Show information? Tonight’s viewing lineup? Competition information? Annoyingly loud flash-embedded video previews of upcoming shows which start automatically and scare the shit out of you?

I don’t think it’s too much to ask to get to the front page of a TV network’s website and be able to confirm what time my favourite show is going to be on tonight. On Seven it’s some clicks and scrolls away. On the Nine website you have to think that maybe it will be in the entertainment section and then you find that you’re suddenly on the TV Week website and then you still have to click and scroll before you find what you want. Meanwhile the Ten website has the guide just one click away. This sounds good but it’s not. When you get there the guide is actually difficult to use.

This example just adds more fuel to the argument that the networks really don’t understand their audience. Both Nine and Seven have partnerships with internet companies for their websites. At least if you put seven.com into your browser you get to some Channel 7 content but Nine are just being right-royally screwed by their ninemsn partnership. If a viewer is going to a network’s website it could be for any number of reasons but surely one of them is to find out some information about the network. That might be a program guide or some information about one its shows.

Ten have got this half right with their new site but when they’re spending as much money as they are on “web presence” they should get it all right.

Network executives have got to realise that the world has changed and they can no longer force habits on their audience. There is too much choice out there to not give them what they want from the start. A little bit of market research goes a long way on the internet and TV networks have an opportunity to build some brand-loyalty but instead they just see fit to piss it up a wall.

Give me a reason to stop watching TV shows through other avenues and I’ll do it, but sitting me in front of a station promo while rubbing a cheese-grater across my face isn’t going to work. I’m just going to get pissed off.

If you’ve ever been to YouTube, you’d be familiar with the top right-hand corner of the home page, which is normally home to a paid video advertisement. Well, if you go there right now, it’s showing an ad for the movie Ghost Rider. But what’s this? It’s sporting that orange OFLC “this film has advertising approval” banner…and the Australian release date…and the website for the movie ending in .au – yep, this is an Australian(ish, considering it’s for a US movie) TV commercial!

I’m jumping to the conclusion that YouTube can now localise that ad spot. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out in the local ad, movie and TV industries: watch this space, indeed.