• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, October 4, 2006

Aiming to build Web traffic while also broadening the audience for its TV programs, News Corp. Tuesday expanded the roster of Fox shows available online for free.

Fox Tuesday placed already-aired episodes from the current season of "Bones," "Prison Break," "Standoff," "Vanished," "Justice," "Talk Show With Spike Feresten," "'Til Death," and "The Loop" on MySpace.com and Web sites of 24 local affiliates. Many of these shows currently are in re-runs this month, or will be preempted for the Major League Baseball post-season games.

Toyota, Burger King and Lionsgate Films are sponsoring the free streams, with Toyota's Yaris the exclusive sponsor for the local affiliates' "Prison Break" streams. Shows will have pre-roll ads as well as ads that run between acts of the shows--although total ad time will be much shorter than during TV broadcasts. While the specifics vary by show, generally, each program will be accompanied by one 15-second pre-roll ad, and one-hour shows likely will have three ad breaks with one 30-second spot in each.

Online, the shows will run exclusively for three months on MySpace.com, and the 24 owned-and-operated Fox Web sites. More programs might be added in upcoming months, said Mickie Rosen, senior vice president, general manager of entertainment for Fox Interactive Media.

The deal marks an expansion of the "Fox on Demand" initiative, which launched in August and involved streaming ad-supported episodes of "Prison Break" "Bones," "Stacked," "The Loop," and "American Dad" to nine local Fox Web sites.

The move to stream additional TV shows was hinted at last week by Fox Interactive Media President Ross Levinsohn. Speaking at the OMMA conference in New York, he suggested that the network intended to make more shows available online, in the wake of its successful Webcast of a seven-minute clip from "The Simpsons." Burger King was the exclusive sponsor of the "Simpsons" clip, which received wide online play in the three days leading up to the show's season premiere. In that time, the clip garnered 1.4 million streams, with 80 percent of MySpace users watching five full minutes of the video.