Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

Whedon’s “Dr. Horrible” Is Already Crashing Servers

Joss Whedon’s new Internet-based musical, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” has generated enough buzz that its premiere on Tuesday forced the makers to allocate more bandwidth due to the number of servers that crashed.

The first show of “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” the newest genre-bending show from Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Firefly, went live on Tuesday at midnight. International viewers, however, were unable to watch the show due to the fact that the Hulu video player was incompatible overseas. By early Tuesday morning, the Web site crashed and the makers were forced to allocate more bandwidth.

The musical follows the blogged exploits of the eponymous criminal “mastermind,” as played by Neil Patrick Harris, in his attempts to obtain membership to the Evil League of Evil and win the heart of his crush.

In order to bring his vision of a “low-rent super villain” to life, Whedon enlisted the aid of associates. Nathan Fillion of Whedon’s short-lived show, Firefly, and spin-off film, Serenity, plays Dr. Horrible’s nemesis, Captain Hammer.

Felicia Day, an alumnus of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who plays Dr. Horrible’s love interest, was excited about the inventive program.

“When Joss invites you onto a project described as a supervillain Internet musical, you don’t blink, you just say ‘yes please!’” she said.

For the first week, the show will be presented to audiences free of charge and advertising. The next episode premieres on July 17.

From Businessweek.com :

Joss Whedon’s Wacky Web Experiment Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer likely will flock to Whedon’s new Dr. Horrible online project. His business plan may be just as interesting

Sometimes, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. In Joss Whedon’s case, what he felt he had to do was make an online musical about a super villain who keeps getting foiled by a hero as he pines after the girl from the laundromat. So he did, funding Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog in "the low six figures" out of his own pocket.

Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, knows how to attract passionate fans like no other. So Dr. Horrible is almost guaranteed to be a hit, especially by Internet standards. (And we loved it, too—see our review.) But in deciding to release his musical extravaganza online, he got as creative with the business plan as he did with the concept.

The first of three installments of the 42-minute musical was released (with some technical difficulty, due to overwhelming demand and unforeseen geographic limitations) on the evening of July 15. The second one will go live July 17 and the third on July 19. If you want to stream the ad-supported episodes for free, you must do so before July 20, when they will be taken down. If you want to buy them on iTunes ($1.99 per section or $3.99 for the series), you can hold onto them. After that, the plan is to release a DVD version, either independently or with a studio, that includes an all-new musical by the cast and crew that’s also 42 minutes long, to be called Commentary!

"We wanted to make an event out of it, like an old TV event, when you have to be in the same place at the same time," said Whedon, admitting that part of the motivation was revving the hype engines.

Online Video: Show Me the Money

Rewarding your fans’ obsessions is good business, especially online, where the true fanatics thrive. And Whedon is having a half-baked, creative, unregulated time of it. If he doesn’t make a profit based on iTunes downloads and ad-supported streams, revenue from the Commentary! DVD might make up for it. But while DVD sales and rentals rose 1.6% in the first half of this year from the same six-month period the year before, DVD sales for the whole of 2007 famously dropped for the first time ever.

And to be clear, nobody thinks there’s much money in online video, at least not yet. The best estimates put revenue from online video advertising at around $1 billion this year, and paid downloads at somewhat less than that. But iTunes is quickly ramping up sales and the folks at Google are wracking their brains trying to figure out how to make a dime back from YouTube. This is the way people watch content now, for better or worse, so there’d better be some money in it!

How the business side of things will turn out for Whedon remains to be seen, but the upside will undoubtedly be more advantageous for him and the rest of the team than it would have been if they’d funded and released a musical television special or movie. By rejecting traditional financing, ownership and distribution methods, Whedon wasn’t constrained by other people’s content windows, bottlenecks, and antiquated arrangements. And so he’s able to meet his fans on his own terms.