KNOWING YOUR AUDIENCE:

Sci Fi Creates ‘Webisodes’ to Lure Viewers to TV (JONATHAN D. GLATER, 9/05/06, NY Times)

Beginning tonight the television series “Battlestar Galactica” will travel from outer space into cyberspace. The Sci Fi Channel, which broadcasts the series, has created online mini-episodes, the first of which is scheduled to be posted at midnight.

The 10 Web segments, each just a few minutes long and viewable on devices ranging from iPods to laptops to desktops to full-size television sets, feature characters from the television show. And they have the same dark feel of broadcast episodes of “Galactica,” a post-apocalyptic survival tale of humans on the run after their home planets have been destroyed.

The mini-episodes will go online, one at a time, on Tuesday and Thursday nights until “Galactica’s” season premiere on Oct. 6. They focus on two soldiers in a new city built by humans fleeing Cylons, a race of machines that has wiped out human civilization elsewhere.

The two face difficult choices about how — or whether — to fight back against a new Cylon invasion, the climactic moment of last season. Their decisions will help explain their actions in future on-air episodes.

These Web segments are a bit of a gamble. Sci Fi executives are betting that people who are only glancingly familiar with the series — whose story line may be too complicated to follow for those who don’t know what happened in the first two seasons — will be able to follow the story told online.

Never underestimate the power of geekhood.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 5, 2006 9:24 AM