8 days a week?

In case you missed it, there was a 5 hour pregame event leading up to last night's new episode of House. Apparently, Alicia Keys and Tom Petty played, and they even held a football game to build momentum leading up to TV's best show.

Working as a flack, I'm often torn away from keeping any semblance of a normal TV routine (this doesn't count that fact that I didn't bother with cable, because most of what i want to watch can be found on the internet anyway).

So, the goal for me yesterday was a simple one: Watch last week's episode of House online, watch the 5 hour warm-up (including commercials) leading to the new show, and then watch the new show.

Imagine my surprise when I found out that Rupert's Empire, which I typically think is ahead of the curve in online video (after all, they worked with Hulu to have streaming superbowl commercials... they launched a successful show on MySpace that is getting picked up on another network) has a policy that makes me wait 8 days until after an episode airs to find it online.

I'd even accept 6 days... making it so I can watch the episode at least 1 day in front of another new episode... but apparently Rup's not having it. Apparently, you get 2 options now.

1. Fall behind and try to guess what happened last week based on what's going on in a new episode
2. Stay perpetually behind

I understand that TV's business can be based on appointment viewing (i.e. getting higher rating during a specific time)... but this seems to make it harder to attract an audience each week. Is it any wonder that Tivo/DVR and illegal downloads are so popular?

One day, the cable networks will figure it out. They need to, otherwise they are faced with heading the same direction the music industry went.