Disney-Hulu Deal Is Ominous For YouTube

Hugh Pickens writes "Dow Jones reports that Hulu scored a big victory when Disney agreed to take a nearly 30% stake in Hulu and put full episodes of its ABC TV shows on the site, enabling users to see shows like Lost, Scrubs, Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives for free. Disney views the move as a way to reach a new audience that isn't coming to the network's own website. Although the ABC.com website has attracted regular viewers of its shows, Hulu offers the opportunity to tap into a new group of viewers. Now Google is under mounting pressure to add more professional content to YouTube in order to attract more advertisers. According to Dow Jones' Scott Morrisson, the equity structure of the Disney-Hulu deal suggests that content creators want greater involvement in online distribution than Google has offered with YouTube. 'Content providers don't want to give (YouTube) content because the advertisers aren't there yet,' said Edward Jones analyst Andy Miedler."

Comments

Digging their own graves?

[mister_playboy]

I am eager to see the old cable subscription model fail, so we can actually have some decent internet speeds here in the US. If these companies have trouble monetizing this new approach, that won't exactly break my heart, though.

Most viewed debacle

[computerMechanic]

The major downside to this deal IMHO is the disappearance of the most viewed categories from both youtube and google video. Now we have the Most Popular categorie which consists of fred, disney, american idol and the like. I miss being able to look up a list of most viewed, by country and date.

Hulu == Intrusiveness.No && OldBoxSupport.

[N!NJA]

i never watched videos at ABC.com because the site always required more than i was willing to install (or mess) in my PC. i just decided to give them another try and see what their current requirements for streaming videos are.... and guess what? surprisingly -- they changed it! however -- not surprisingly -- the new requirements are still too restrictive. currently, their videos wont play (and, given their nature, that really isnt any loss) just because i'm a happy user of Win2000.... O.o

TNT is another loser who will eventually take their content to Hulu. on TNT.com the user is required to install some Microsoft DRM plugin crap.... those companies shoot themselves in the foot when they make their sites so picky! with Hulu, it just works! you only need a browser (ANY!) and the Flash plugin. it has never asked me to install anything! btw, YouTube and PBS have got some shows online as well....and they also just work!

the other thing i like about Hulu is their choice of Flash player. it exposes the QUALITY options (HIGH, MEDIUM and Low), which can be the difference between a choppy and a smooth playback. i hope they dont remove it (seems to be the trend)!

what's with that anyway? many websites are doing away with the QUALITY option and just imposing the (more resource-intensive) HIGH setting! geez, sometimes that setting makes Flash just plain unwatchable in my Athlon 3000. why are developers removing an option that is actually useful?!?! it was fine the way it was before when it defaulted to HIGH but let you change it. what's next? are they going to remove the FULLSCREEN option too?

and no, kid! i'm not gonna retire my perfectly functional Atlhon 3000.... or my Pentium 3 700MHz! now get off my lawn!

defective by design

[kingduct]

I tried using Hulu. It was designed not to let me press the pause button and let the entire show download over my cheap DSL (my usual practice with any flash videos that are higher bandwidth than my internet). It would only buffer the next several seconds, I assume to prevent me from downloading the entire file. I never went back and had to go back to using other sources of television that exist online...

Not a solution

[AliasMarlowe]

http://www.youtube.com/shows http://www.youtube.com/movies

Youtube sucks just as much as Hulu sometimes:
This video is not available in your country
That was for "The Outer Limits", "Married with Children", "The Addams family", and "Terry Jones' Medieval Lives". There may be some shows available in my country, but I gave up trying at that point.