As pilots appear elsewhere, TV schedule matters little

You can watch the premiere of ``Heroes," NBC's much-buzzed-about new series, tonight at 9, as the network's ads suggest. But you didn't have to wait for it to show up on television.

If you were curious, you might have downloaded the pilot on iTunes, or watched it on Yahoo video. And if you miss an episode when it airs, you'll still have a chance to see it, via streaming video, on nbc.com.

In short, for ``Heroes" and many other shows this season, you don't have to worry about the television schedule at all.

Not long ago, this would have been anathema to industry executives, who aimed to pull as many eyes as possible to one-time-only broadcasts, and shunned time-shifting devices like TiVos as threats to the 30-second ad. This season, the networks have begun to change their ways.

The television schedule is ``less important now than it ever was," says Josh Bernoff, a principal analyst at Cambridge-based Forrester Research. ``And it will be less important every year than it was the year before."

Thus, many fall pilots, which began rolling out in earnest this week, have been easy to find in other places. CBS made the pilots of ``Smith" and its new sitcom ``The Class" available for free on Google Video for four days last week, along with the season premiere of ``The New Adventures of Old Christine." NBC let Netflix subscribers rent pilots of ``Kidnapped" and ``Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," and has been offering pilots for free, for a limited time, on aol.com and cable on demand.

And once the new season begins, the networks will make many shows available outside their television time slots. CBS will stream most of its shows on its broadband site, with ads, the day after they air. Last week, the network also announced a deal with Comcast Cable to make several shows, including ``CSI" and ``Survivor," available on demand for free -- with ads included -- the day after they're broadcast.

NBC, meanwhile, will stream its new fall shows on its website for free. ABC will stream seven shows on abc.com, and post some of its shows on iTunes for $1.99. Fox is letting local affiliates stream some prime-time shows on their websites.

The moves represent a landmark shift in the way networks think about attracting and keeping viewers. In the past, TV executives seemed loath to jeopardize traditional Nielsen ratings, which measured only those people who watched a show exactly when it aired. But in recent years, Nielsen has added ways to measure a show's audience within a day and a week of its original broadcast. The networks have found that online ads make money.

And they have come to believe that reaching viewers on their own terms can only expand an audience.

``The person who would have missed it on television would have missed it, period," said Albert Cheng, executive vice president of digital media for the Disney-ABC Television Group. ``You're capturing them online."

Industry watchers have anticipated this shift for years, predicting that TV schedules, the subject of great intrigue and internal politicking, would eventually become obsolete. But changes have been slow to take hold, in part because viewers have stuck to their ways; digital video recorders, such as TiVo, are still used by only 12 percent of viewers.

But within five years, about half of US households are expected to have DVRs, which allow users to record, largely through cable and satellite systems, Bernoff said. Video on demand is available in a quarter of households.

And the audience already feels empowered, said Jeff Gaspin, president of NBC Universal Cable Entertainment, digital content, and cross-network strategy. ``The idea of the passive viewer, the couch potato, has certainly changed," he said.

Still, reaching out beyond the schedule has been a matter of some nervousness, and ABC roiled the television world when it put already-aired episodes of ``Lost" and ``Desperate Housewives" on iTunes last fall, then posted them on abc.com last spring.

But Cheng said market testing found that the moves had attracted new viewers, and hadn't poached many existing ones.

Other networks have reached similar conclusions. Last winter, CBS briefly offered previously aired episodes of the comedies ``How I Met Your Mother" and ``Two and a Half Men" for free on yahoo.com, hoping to lure college students home on break. Broadcast ratings soon spiked among young viewers, said CBS spokesman Dana McClintock.

Online television viewers, so far, seem younger than the traditional network audience; ABC found that viewers who watched ``Lost" and ``Desperate Housewives" online had an average age of 29, much younger that the broadcast average.

They are also, it turns out, fairly stingy about television. While networks continue to post shows on iTunes, CBS researchers found people prefer to watch content that's free, and ad-supported, rather than paying a nominal fee. CBS's new deal with Comcast replaces an old one that would have offered shows for 99 cents per episode. What the networks hope is that no matter where they see a show, viewers will grow loyal, and spread the word to friends.

And some tech-savvy viewers are taking pride in the sense that they've started a trend. Some, using free software and a smidgen of know-how, have for years downloaded pirated copies of shows from newsgroups.

Networks still want to control where their material appears, and they want to make money from it. But executives acknowledge that viral marketing has worked. The new goal, says Cheng of ABC, is ``to make sure that there's a vehicle and a means to do this legally."

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com