For my first story of 2015, I looked at one of the biggest head-scratchers in The Interview’s strange saga: why Sony dropped the ball on the chance to boost the profile of its own streaming site, Crackle. As I wrote at Quartz,

Yet despite a New York Post report on December 21st that Sony was going to stream The Interview on Crackle, a studio source tells Quartz that Crackle was not considered as part of The Interview’s digital strategy, given that the free site has no mechanism in place for charging consumers the $5.99 rental and $14.99 purchase fee for the film that the other VOD outlets have been offering.

Still, this is a major missed opportunity for Crackle, which has been trying to lure new viewers with several new original films and series (though only one, Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, seems to have any real traction).

This would seem to be the last Interview story I’ll do for awhile, but never say never…

Why Crackle, Sony’s big digital video play, was sidelined for ‘The Interview’

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Yesterday, everyone was talking about the Seinfeld reunion that aired during the Super Bowl. As I wrote at Quartz,

While social media immediately began buzzing about the spot, which Seinfeld put together with the help of Seinfeld co-creator Larry David, it wasn’t actually a Super Bowl ad. Neither Seinfeld nor Sony, which owns Crackle, paid FOX any money for the segment, according to The New York Times. Instead, FOX reached out to Seinfeld and asked him to put together a feature segment to help the network kick off its halftime coverage.

A longer version of the reunion ran as part of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Jerry Seinfeld’s web series for Crackle.

One of the most buzzed-about Super Bowl ads wasn’t actually an ad

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