Since it debuted more than 15 years ago, CBS’s Big Brother has sold online access to the live feeds directly from the BB “house.” Now the network is going all in for the next season of the long-running reality competition, making it an online exclusive.
Variety reports that after the current summer season of the show ends, CBS will launch almost immediately into another season.
Rather than air that new season on TV, where Big Brother typically takes up a total of three hours in prime time each week during the summer, the new content will be exclusively presented on CBS All Access, the network’s $6/month subscription service.
Paying for All Access currently gives you — in addition to a library of CBS content — access to the Big Brother live feeds. However, those live feeds will often go dark for hours, even days, at a time whenever contestants take part in a competition that the network wants to keep relatively secret until the show airs on prime time.
It’s not known if CBS will change that blackout tactic with the new season, or what sort of balance there will be between edited “shows” and spending countless hours staring the hamsters in their habitat, tossing out reality TV phrases about “being thrown under the bus” and how they “didn’t come here to make friends,” and the ultimate: “at the end of the day…”
At $6/month, All Access isn’t worth keeping year-round for many people, even Big Brother fans, who can ditch the service for the nine months of the year the show isn’t on. The apparent hope is that people who pay for All Access during BB’s typical summer runs will stick around with the service during the fall and into the beginning of 2017, when the new Star Trek series, Star Trek Beyond, launches exclusively on the service.
by Chris Morran via Consumerist
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