Kevin Pollak’s ‘Chat Show’ Heading to Hulu, Amazon

Kevin Pollak’s Chat Show, the Streamy-winning Charlie Rose-style interview web series with titular host Kevin Pollak, is heading to Amazon VOD and Hulu, according to a recent Beet TV interview (below) by Daisy Whitney.

The one year-old talk show has become the anchor of upstart web show network that Pollak co-founded, This Week In—and notably the only show on the network without “This Week In” in its title.

“Amazon has just made us a crazy sweet deal for the whole library,” said Pollak in the interview. The Amazon deal, Pollak tells us, is apparently set for the entire library for purchase, rental, Video On Demand & digital download, as well as all new episodes. While Hulu has made a similar offer—for the entire library as well as future episodes—the deal has yet to be officially closed.

What began with just over a thousand or so viewers for his low-fi “live internet show on a Sunday afternoon,” the audience now ranges anywhere from 30,000 to 80,000 live viewers. On demand downloads, where much of the audience tunes in, is “in the millions,” Pollak notes. In fact many are happy just to grab the interviews as standalone audio podcasts, with KPCS

doing over 1,200,000 audio podcast downloads in the last 3 months.

Also in talks for deals is Pollak’s vampire comedy Vamped Out that he co-created and directed for Babelgum this spring. Word is that the comedy will launch on Amazon shortly after the Chat Show does.

“It’s been an exceptional experience—and there are more episodes are coming,” Pollak said about Vamped Out in a recent episode of KPCS (above). And for those who asked, he cites Wainy Days as the first web series that caught his eye, when a viewer posed the question in the “Ask Kevin” segment of that same episode, with guest Paul Rudd.

This Sunday’s episode of Kevin Pollak’s Chat Show will feature Mad Men’s Emmy-nominated John Slattery as his guest, timed nicely with the premiere of Mad Men’s Season 4 that evening.