LOS ANGELES - Aziz Ansari is bringing his new comedy special straight to his fans. The "Parks and Recreation" star is bypassing cable networks to release it on his website.
Ansari's "Dangerously Delicious" standup special will be available online worldwide for $5 beginning Tuesday.
"It seemed like the smartest way to deliver it," the 29-year-old comedian said. Fans can download or stream the 60-minute show without commercials or restrictions.
Ansari is the latest entertainer to bypass the big guys and sell his material straight to his fans. Radiohead famously did it with their pay-what-you-wish download of "In Rainbows" in 2007, and comedian Louis C.K. opened the door for comics to do the same when he sold his "Live at the Beacon Theater" standup special online in December and brought in more than $1 million in the first two weeks.
"It seems like this is the thing to do at this moment when so much is changing and nobody's really figured out how to do anything," Ansari said, adding that he was inspired by the popularity of his comedy clips on YouTube. "In this era, the way people consume media, the way people release media has not caught up."
The straight-to-fans approach works especially well for comedy, Ansari said: "It makes sense that comedians would embrace something like this where you have so much control over how you're releasing stuff. ... Comedians are used to being autonomous anyway."
Still, such online success mostly belongs to artists with established audiences, says Karen North, director of the USC Annenberg Program in Online Communities.
Direct-to-consumer entertainment is a growing trend, "but I don't think it's going to destroy the studio system," she said.
"If you have a following, it's great, because you have people to announce it to, people to anticipate it and people to search for you," she said.
Like Louis C.K., Ansari funded his production and the website to sell it. By making the special available around the world, he's counting on his fans -- including the 1.7 million who follow him on Twitter -- to help him recoup his costs. He can even tell them about it in person during his "Buried Alive" tour, which begins next month in New Jersey and continues through the summer.
