Over the past few summers, I have really been getting into Big Brother. I didn't see the show until Season 11 and that summer it was about half over by the time I started watching it. So this is only the second season I have watched it from beginning to end. Or 13 will end in a few weeks anyway. For this season (13) I actually sprung for the live feeds (called "SuperPass"). You pay $14.99 per month for the privilege of watching the Big Brother House Guests 24 x 7 on 4 different cameras.
I only paid for one month because I wanted to see what it was like. For most of that month, the $10 music credit was 'broken'. It wasn't until just a few days before my subscription lapsed that I was able to redeem my $10 music credit. Now that almost made me want to keep the SuperPass. But spending $15 per month to get $10 worth of music made no sense unless the Superpass offered some sort of other value. Big Brother itself is very short term (only runs through mid September), so I had to look at what value other than BB it had and it was pretty sparse. I could watch full episodes of 'Ochocinco' and 'Famous Food' neither of which has anything like the BB live feeds. In fact both of those shows appear on my "On Demand" choices in my cable.
So I could find no value in it after Big Brother ran out. Was it worth it for the month? Well yes it was. One thing though, it's a tremendous time eater. In the beginning it was strangely voyeuristic feeling. The houseguests know they're on camera and mics, so they act a certain way most of the time. However, if you really want to get to know the house guests better, the live feeds are the best way to do it. You hear many different varieties of conversations that you'll never hear on the scaled down 1 hour TV presentations. And you see an occasional "nip slip" and even a "peen slip" if you're into that. Yes Bendon's half erect peen showed in the shower cam once. Why they had a camera in the shower, I can only shake my head and wonder. Words are not censored out either so you hear everything; every F word, B words, C words, etc. Things that get BLEEP'd out (and the house guest's mouth gets pixeled out) on the broadcast show.
All in all I highly recommend the live feeds if you're a Big Brother fan. Big Brother is the only reality show that I know that requires their contestants to stay inside a house for the entire run of the show. Other house based reality shows (Jersey Shore, Bad Girls Club, Real World) don't require that so live feeds would not work very well. Other reality game shows like Survivor and Amazing Race are aired after they're finished and obviously live feeds wouldn't work there. So Big Brother is amazing in that regard and probably very profitable for CBS. If you are concerned about putting a credit card on something and not being able to cancel it, don't worry. I had no problem with that. Although they did try to talk me out of canceling of course.
But the bottom line for me is that the Superpass was worth it, but I can't see much value in it after Big Brother ends.
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