'Conviction' premieres on iTunes

As I have noted several times before, I don't watch much TV. At the bare minimum I don't make time to watch any television shows. About as close I get is when Piccu and I run over to Big Kev's to watch Lost and Invasion. However, the fact that these shows rarely come on more than a couple of weeks in a row without a "clip-show" of some sort keeps me from being a regular viewer.

Over the past couple of weeks/months, I'm sure we've all seen the promos for Dick Wolf's new lawyer drama Conviction.

Most of Wolf's shows are based around the same thing. People getting arrested and put on trial. I honestly don't believe that any of Law & Order shows do too well with younger viewers. So he's come up with this show about young assistant district attorneys in New York City.

When I saw the first preview to this show I'll admit that I was interested just a little, but honestly it didn't strike me as a show that I was just going to absolutely have to see if only for the first episode. Then I saw that it was premiering and going to be shown on Friday nights.

That basically meant that I was out because I usually have something to do on a Friday night or by the time it came on I would be plugged into the internet or knee deep in XM radio. And then there is the Arrested Development-syndrome that looms over many shows these days premiering on a sucky night in that you don't want to get sucked into it because it'll never pull good ratings on its scheduled night and be cancelled.

Piccu thinks that it's going to completely suck and if anyone would know, it would be him.

Then all of the sudden we have the pilot episode of Conviction premiering on iTunes a couple of weeks before its actual premiere on TV. This is a dynamite idea. I had Piccu download it at his office with his lightning fast internet connection and I watched it the other night.

Is it a great show? I guess. It's just as good as any of his other shows, in my opinion. I'll admit that after I watched the pilot, I was anxious to see the next episode to see how some things played out. However, I'm never going to make time to watch this show on a Friday night. It's just not going to happen.

That being said, this was a ridiculously ingenius idea to get their claws into viewers. Downloading a 200+ megabyte file is a little rich, but if one has a decent connection it could be done overnight. Or in Piccu's case, a couple of minutes.

This is also an idea that will be great for advertisers. There will be tons of people who will watch the pilot on TV and watch the subsequent shows. More so than would have originally had the show not been released. And it's not like it cost much money. All they had to do was re-render the show into an iTunes-friendly format and FTP it to someone. Setting that up might take 30-minutes and it will make them millions.

I won't be watching on Friday since I'm hoping/expecting to be shooting a championship basketball game, but I'm sure there are a ton of young people who are going to watch/tape/TiVo this show.

And it's all because it was offered up on iTunes for free. This won't be the last time you see a new show released like this.