Fox to stream premieres for dorms
‘Fringe,’ ‘Terminator’ bow to college audiences
By MICHAEL SCHNEIDER

In a first, Fox will stream the premiere of “Fringe” and season opener
of “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” online at the same time
as they bow on TV.

But there’s a catch: Only computer users on college campuses will be
able to log in to watch the simul-stream.

Move helps Fox expose the trend-setting college audience — who are
more likely to have computers than TVs in their dorm rooms — to the
shows.

Computers logging into Fox.com from a college-based .edu domain will
be given full streaming access to “Terminator” on Sept. 8, the same
night it returns on Fox, and the series premiere of “Fringe” Sept. 9,
when it launches on the net.

Fox content strategy senior VP Bill Bradford came up with the idea
after noticing that .edu addresses were among Fox.com’s top visitors.

“We talked about what we could do with colleges given the fact that we
have so much traffic coming from them,” said Fox Entertainment
chairman Peter Liguori. “The light bulb went off — by simul-streaming
‘Fringe’ and ‘Sarah Connor,’ (the college students) get to see the
show, and we get the increased fanbase and buzz.”

The sites also will offer up behind-the-scenes footage, cast
interviews and musicvideos for college viewers.

The promotion also comes as Nielsen begins to measure college-student
viewing in a limited fashion. Last year Nielsen started including
college students living away from home in its national People Meter
ratings. The ratings firm doesn’t consider dorm rooms as separate
households but includes students who happen to be a part of a Nielsen
family.

Ironically, college students are among the most notorious for using
their .edu addresses to illegally download copyrighted content –
which perhaps include the bootleg copies of “Fringe” currently making
the Internet rounds. Now that “Fringe” will be streamed, Liguori said,
“There’s no need to do anything dumb.”

Liguori said it’s too soon to determine whether the network will
regularly stream premieres or regular episodes simultaneously with
their on-air runs. “We’ll see how this experiment goes,” he said.
- source variety