Michael Jackson still sells. (ap)
(
)
The Michael Jackson Dr. Feel Good trial? There’s an app for that.
Within 24 hours of its launch on Monday — the day Dr. Conrad Murray’s involuntary manslaughter case began in LA — a 99-cent app that shows a live video stream of the trial is the No. 1 best-seller on iTunes’ paid news app list.
That much interest in the app — which offers news commentary, analysis, documents and timelines as well as live video from the courtroom — caught even its creators by surprise.
It was a “we’ll build it and we hope people come” situation, says Jose Rios, VP of Digital News Operations at Fox Television Stations, which created the app.
“We were hopeful that it would do well, but we didn’t know that it would do this well.”
The app has been downloaded around the world — notably in Australia, England and Germany — and even scored some downloads, without advance publicity, when it quietly went live on the Android Market on Friday. (The app is also available through other mobile phones.)
Rios says that the “Michael Jackson Doctor Trial” app was inspired by the popular “Casey Anthony Trial” app, which debuted in June.
“I thought that was a smart thing that they had done,” he says, adding that Fox Television Stations saw the doctor’s trial as a logical way for local news affiliates to make their entree into the news app world.
The decision to make the Murray trial its first experiment was a no-brainer, Rios says, in part because Los Angeles affiliate KTTV Fox 11 had already planned wall-to-wall coverage of the case. (They’re providing all of the app’s coverage.)
And, “When Michael Jackson died, there was a huge outpouring [in LA], and we thought that a lot of his fans and other people would want to watch [the trial], so we decided to go ahead” with the app, Rios says.
Fox Television Stations is prepared to update the app as necessary throughout the trial.
Rios isn’t too concerned with Internet chatter about the app being inappropriately ghoulish or cashing in on a tragedy.
“If you’re saying that, then you probably believe that about all the coverage of [the trial],” he says.