Real Talk

So as most of the BB universe has heard, Real Networks' Superpass will not be providing live feeds this summer in the United States. Instead, for the first time in years, live feeds will be provided through CBS.com.

I'm not sure about this development. Superpass has been a pro-fan endeavor, financially encouraging fan content, working to cultivate bonus content through Reality Nation, and developing relationships both online and in person with some of Big Brother's biggest advocates.

Full disclosure: In addition to currently sporting a Reality Nation t-shirt, I previously worked for Reality Nation covering Celebrity Big Brother, and visited their offices and studio about a year ago for an entertaining lunch and tour with Matt Calder (Superpass product manager), and the on-camera team of Chelsia, Missy and Spicypants. I found them all to be lovely, professional people who had endless enthusiasm for discussing all things Big Brother - in other words, exactly my kind of people.

So I'm sad to see all the passion they've put in to developing this content coming to an end. They may take a lot of flack online, but I can't think of any other television show that's received this kind of intense cultivation from an online team. Big Brother's online activity has been a unique creation, and it's mostly due to the tireless work from the Superpass team.

At the same time, they've created a bit of a monster. The amount of fan sites has grown exponentially through Superpass's support. It's become a cottage industry rather than a game, and sometimes, that can make it a little less fun.

I hope that the move to CBS.com will at least mean a return to some genuine excitement around the show. It will also give CBS an opportunity to hear directly from the fans when the endless feed outages start, taking out Superpass as the intermediary.

At the same time, I hope they recognize that online buzz is a critical factor to the Big Brother franchise and has to be considered.

And I really hope they understand that we are going to have high expectations. They should ask Superpass what happened when they rolled out insufficient feed players in the past. We need our quality, we need our quad cams, we need our flashback.

At the very least, we need consistent live feeds - Big Brother UK just isn't the same without them, and I certainly hope this isn't the start of a reduction in their service.

(Y'all can keep the chat features, though, cause, ugh.)

Edited to add:

It helps to reread. CBS does plan to keep up some kind of affiliate program, so pretty much everything I said went out the window, it's just that now it will answer to CBS instead of Real. I'm not sure that's an improvement, but we'll see.