For the my "screening" this week I watched the show "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" on the popular television website hulu.com. Interestingly enough my experience could hardly be considered exemplary of convergence culture. One would think that such a popular website would utilize media convergence to the fullest extent to reap the maximum benefits from its capacity to do so, but I found that this was not the case at all. Unlike the website for "The Hills" that was utilized in lecture earlier this week, media convergence played an extremely small part in the advertising on the site. In fact, any advertising at all (as well as any convergent devices) was minimal. More than anything the site seemed to operate like television with less commercials. The ads had nothing to do with the program. I believe the ad shown during the show was for a car. There was no option to buy Charlie's sweatshirt or Dennis' preferred hair gel or whatever other ridiculous products are hawked in conjunction with other television shows on the web. I didn't have to watch any promos for upcoming episodes of the show, nor could I even find a link to the shows official website! Three thirty second ads and a small banner ad were the entire extent of the advertising I encountered.  Other aspects of convergence culture within the site were limited. There was a tab for discussion about the episode/show and for reviews of the episode. That covers just about all of the truly "convergent" aspects of the site.

So why bother to create such a site? Or, rather, why would one create such a site and not utilize further convergent technologies? The site provides a place to watch television with less ads than actual television and more control over what one is watching and when, but nothing more. It occurred to me that the site seemed to actually become an advertisement for the act of watching television itself. Most of the "advertising" on the site was for other shows also featured on the site. Below the video player there were links to other TV shows featured on the site and clips from other shows as well as other episodes of "Always Sunny." The site becomes something of an advertisement for itself more than anything else. This poses an interesting challenge to the supposed trend of convergence. One of the most popular television websites on the internet hardly utilizes any convergent mechanisms at all. How can we view this site in terms of convergence?