Disney’s recently launched online content experiment Stage 9 has gotten plenty of press, almost universally bad. But their first program, Squeegees could have at least given itself a chance if it was willing to stand next to its criticism.

By making their content embeddable Stage 9 could have allowed people to make their own decision. Just about every online publication would have put it next to their bad review. If they had, it would have had far more than the 13,000 views it received so far on YouTube, maybe it would have even reached a few people who actually like it.

Not all content should be embeddable, valuable content deserves to be protected. But original content has no value until it has an audience. And any company experimenting in this space should have the foresight to work with its potential audience rather than against it.

Instead, far more people got a negative impression of Stage 9 content without ever seeing it, something they will carry with them next time they think of Disney/ABC. Then again, maybe Stage 9 just realized the content they created was so bad, reviews could never do it justice.

UPDATE: (I love it when they listen) The first show is now embedded below.

Tags: Disney Stage 9 Squeegees

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 11:44 pm and is filed under Content, video syndication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.