The WB Tries To Make A Comeback

Bruce Simmons — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 03:32:22 +0000

Yeah, I did say The WB.

Some of you have repeatedly said in commentary or email communications with me that you’re tired of network TV and it just doesn’t appeal to you. I don’t blame you.

As of August 27th, The WB is trying to give you more options beside advertiser controlled TV.

TheWB.com website is officially launching on the 27th of August. From the offered line up of web-casts, The WB is looking like it’s hoping to snag the viewers who used to watch The WB network on TV before it got absorbed into The CW because some of the offerings are old familiar, popular shows.

So I went over to the TheWB.com Beta site to check it out. The Beta wants me to sign up before accessing anything. I usually don’t like signing up before looking, but for you guys, I dove right in. It’s a stupid web page so far. When I hit return to auto-fill in the fields, it doesn’t and tells me I’ve not completed the form properly. It took me three tries to get the dang thing filled out!

After filling in my name and email address, it took me to a thanks splash screen… The sign up splash screen tells us some of what we’ll be able to watch on the website.

Meanwhile, I waited over on AOL for what I assumed, would be my confirmation email. And waited… I went off to make the bed and had breakfast.

And waited… Sometimes AOL cuts you off at the knees and you never see what they consider to be spam. Maybe that’s why I never got the email. But that’s for my consumer blog somewhere else.

I tried again, this time using my other throw away Yahoo.com email account that let’s me decide what is junk, and I instantaneously received my registration information from theWB.com.

My confirmation email said the following:

We can’t thank you enough for your interest and support of TheWB.com and we’re psyched that you’d like to join our beta test group.

Your info has been received by our account managers and once your account is approved, you’ll receive an email from us confirming your application. This may take up to a week. Please know that we haven’t forgotten about you, we just have a lot of names to sift through. The response has been a littleoverwhelming!

Thanks again for applying to our test group. The WB is back.

Best,

Brent & The WB Team

Thanks Brent! Wow, the disappointment begins so soon as it’s already feeling like the usual network treatment. Fine.. so I can’t peruse everything for you. At least I tried.

The web site will have shows like: All Of Us, Angel, Babylon 5, Blue Water High, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dangerous, Everwood, Firefly, Friends, Gilmore Girls, In Living Color, MADtv, One Tree Hill, Roswell, Smallville, The Loop, The OC and Veronica Mars.

What an interesting mix of old shows. It looks like they’re trying to draw the tried and true demographic from when the network actually had any kind of a semi-decent line up – while interspersing new shows, which I assume they’re beta testing on us in this venue.

From my own experience, fans of Roswell, the older Smallville seasons, Angel, Babylon5, Firefly shows will be happy, but we’re a demographic unto our own. That’s just something advertisers haven’t figure out yet. Someday they will.

I’m guessing that The WB is showing older, proven shows to at least start getting viewers logged in. I anticipate that these viewers will be marketed to, trying to get them to check out the newer offerings that The WB is producing.

As far as new, “original” content is concerned, The WB is offering up the following new shows on their site:

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The WB Tries To Make A Comeback