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Hulu May Begin Charging For Video Content
An anonymous reader writes "According to Jonathan Miller, News Corp's CDO, Hulu may soon begin charging subscription fees for some of their online content. News Corp is the parent company of Fox, which owns a huge portion of Hulu. When Miller of Newscorp was asked if Hulu would begin charging for online content during an Interview with Daily Finance, he said that 'the answer could be yes.' He went on to say that he doesn't 'see why over time that shouldn't happen.'"
Since we still can't watch Hulu in Canada, I won't be paying anything. It's probably cheaper than cable anyways.
Jeruvy
I think what works for consumers most likely -- and this has to be tested, frankly -- is bundles. I think you have to figure out what are the right bundles that people buy and what's contained in that bundle. For example, you could have -- and I'm making this up entirely -- you could have a New York bundle, and that could consist of various papers or publications that are relevant to the audience in New York, and you could make that all, potentially, a bundle to a consumer at one price.
For what it's worth, he also made this statement:
I went from paying $14 to The Wall Street Journal to paying $10 to Amazon. Now the splits there, and I think this is relatively well known, are very, very much in favor of Amazon. So I became very much less valuable to The Wall Street Journal. That's part one. Part two is they don't know I exist. I went from being someone who's their subscriber to being someone who is an Amazon subscriber, which The Wall Street Journal has no visibility back to and cannot manage that customer relationship. . . . So they've lost both the customer management and, trust me, the lion's share of the economics.
You know I hate to be voice of calm reason, folks but this is all the original source reported:
Asked specifically about the future of online video joint venture Hulu, which is currently advertising-supported, he said it "is an environment for premium content." Pointing to the popularity of iPhone applications, he added: "We're seeing the beginning of a very strong app economy."
From there, you can trace a very hilarious wave of the telephone game from blog to blog of people slowly blowing it out of proportion as it's put together that this guy is talking about paid subscriptions and he's in charge of Hulu therefore Hulu must be becoming a paid subscription service.
My work here is dung.
Then I see myself watching Hulu less and less
...You didn't see this coming?
"Our goal each year should be to increase the number of goals we set for ourselves!"
Is anyone seriously surprised? Did anyone really think they were going to give away their content for free forever? Of course they were giving it away free initially to generate interest and then later going to tack on a price tag...
Do they feel the need to add a subscription fee when they already show commercials....? Isn't that what drives dissatisfaction with cable?
I was wondering when it was going to happen. The commercials were not terribly long, and many of them were simply blank.
The whole thing did not seem like a viable business venture, except in the very rare case where you wanted to buy a DVD
of a show. I don't know about you, but why would I want to do that ?
real headline should be "Hulu expects viewership to drop off significantly."
If they charge for on demand content, then people will just go back to downloading it for free.
I came here for a good argument
Get them hooked with freebies - then hit them in the wallet.
Another company who isn't satisfied with the revenue stream from ads now wants to charge for content. Sorry. Not interested. I can watch my cable TV that I already pay for and if I want get a DVR and record my shows and watch them when I want!!! WOW what an idea!!! No I don't work for the cable company or a satellite TV company. I haven't been to their site but my kids have. Not worth the subscription unless it was like 2 or 3 bucks a year. 10 bucks a month can be spent more wisely in other areas.
Fine, but it's either subscription or ads. You don't get to do both.
They own pretty much everything, don't they?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
In Soviet Russia, Hulu pays you to watch!
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
And this will move people to other services like Fancast.com which also does commercials but less often and on my system at least without the insane jump in volume.
"Everybody funny. Now you funny too"
Many of us outside the US can't use Hulu anyway; so it doesn't matter ;-)
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
I guess that is what you shout when you have an useless article with so little information.
I thought fox's HUGE ownership position was exactly the same as the other partners, NBC and ABC.
The day they start charging for content is the day they start down the path of constantly losing visitors until they become another clueless Web 2.0 failure.
When it comes to media on the internet, customers always have the option of getting a particular show, movie, song, etc. for free. When a site charges for content, the customer then sees himself as having two options: pay for an item or go somewhere else to get the same item for free. Pretty obvious choice, isn't it? I don't know why it's so hard for some content providers to grasp.
Slashdot has paid subscription and I don't see people throwing hiss fits here. I'd see nothing wrong with a pay-to-remove-the-ads service (assuming they don't double up on the ads just to annoy people into paying.) What if they charge so you can stream movies still at the theatre? There are a lot of reasons pay content might not be a bad thing. It all depends on how they go about doing it.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
I sense a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly driven back to piracy.
Charming man. I wish I had a daughter so I could forbid her to marry one. -Arthur Dent
Back to TPB
He went on to say that he doesn't 'see why over time that shouldn't happen.'
To keep their users? *shrug*
Sometimes I think the ad model works better here. There are so many other free sources for video these days, especially online-based. :-p
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
What's with the "republicans" tag? I don't see any obvious political connection.
... what it was always designed to do, though admittedly at a higher, more general level than originally envisioned: It will route around the blockage.
-k
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
I can't say I didn't expect this because I did. NewsCorp pretty much monopolized the cable television network market. Hulu better come up for a new advertising pitch however since their main draw on all of those commercials was the whole it's free thing.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
Also if the subscription meant the option to watch a full series without commercial interruption that would be great too.
I have to admit the only reason I downloaded a few Stargate episodes was because I didn't have a TV set I could watch it on. If instead I had the option to pay a minimal monthly fee and pick and choose the shows I wanted to watch with the plus of seeing the show the day it aired, I would have had zero desire to download anything. As it was, a few times I downloaded something, there were no sound or special effects added in, and many times I opted to just buy the video off iTunes, due to the quality of the content. A subscription fee on the range of $10-$15 month would be nice. Anything more, good luck with that Hulu, I'd rather just buy DVDs and episodes of iTunes.
.... ... }
int main (void) {
Hulu, nice knowin' ya...
Lurking in the desert
The whole reason I even watch Hulu is because I don't want to deal with getting the digital converter box when the change happens, and it's cool being able to watch things when you want to. Having to pay for Hulu just ruins the entire great idea of it being like DTV with the normal free channels. Hell, I'd even be cool with more commercials in their shows to keep it free for me. Plus I can watch all the Firefly episodes on there. That's just awesome .
People watched you because you were free. You were a simple way to watch a show someone had missed that maybe the Tivo didn't record due to electrical storm. Once you start charging, you lose your viewership. No viewership? No ad revenue. No viewership? No subscription revenue. And no, you're not Too Big To Fail (TM), so no bailout revenue either.
Too bad. You spent all that money on TV and movie ads about evil alien plots to get eyes on your site, just to screw it all up.
I haven't really used Hulu much, but from what I saw, it's not really worth paying for.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
fans of hulu will migrate to a competing web video service, if they are forced to pay.
Why don't you just write a python script to do this for you, instead of bothering us all with a request that a computer could do much faster and for a much longer period of time. You could easily generate 100k clicks or more using a script.
I admit that when I heard about Hulu, I was skeptical. Very skeptical. I also thought it was a bad idea, I thought it would never fly. I was wrong. I watched my first episodes of Firefly on Hulu. My wife and I use Hulu daily for our television. We don't own a television that we use and we don't particularly care. We liked Hulu... when we're watching actual television we're appalled at the number of ads we have to sit through. Anyway, I see this (surprise) as a bad move for Hulu. They've got a good gig going. My suspicion (with evidence to back me up) is that Hulu was doing fine the way it was going, that it was not taking away viewers from television, and that it was overall a productive means of legally watching content online. Hulu will curl up and die if people have to shell out for it. Might as well start buying the shows you care about on Amazon or iTunes.
"This video is not available in your country"
If video are associated with a price maybe they will start considering offering their video to more than the small US market...
Seriously I try to get this through people's heads all the time... for geeks we sure can be dumb. It is and has been free. If everyone ignores the service if/when it goes pay or even if only parts go pay only IGNORE them, also make it known you are NOT going to pay for the content... ads are enough to deal with for the content. Then Hulu (which is already successful) will find alternate avenues for revenue. If everyone just jumps in right off the bat you have instantly ensured all future video services like this will be pay-only. Wake up! Please.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
because this will surely lead to its demise ( +4, PlusVeryExcellent).
Yours Seditiously,
Kilgore Trout
Save the animals for my dinner.
I have one of these already. It's called "cable." You pay a monthly fee and you get to watch a bunch of different channels with lots of different content. The only difference I can tell between a paid Hulu and cable is that Hulu is only "on demand," has less content, and wants to be PC-only. So, basically, Hulu will be the crappy version of cable.
I'll gladly pay for a service like Hulu if I can watch it from outside the US. No silly "this video isn't available in your region". Just show the damn thing and take my money. Preferably, there's a choice between a small fee per episode or a subcription model.
But I expect they won't do that. So in effect, they don't want my money, they like to trouble me online and would rather see me download tv series.
Well fuck them, then. I could just download the shows off BitTorrent and get higher quality, and less ads, all for the whopping price of $0.
For a download based service, sure, I can see that. But streaming sucks, more so on video. Unless connections get a whole lot better, I'm not the least bit interested in streaming. With downloads, I can do HD, no problems. About 1GB per hour at the standard illegal sources last time I checked. It doesn't take a whole lot to screw up a stream with those sorts of bandwith requirements. Downloads just go a little slower for a bit. Unencrypted, 720p or 1080p, h264 video (3Mbit/sec minimum, probably about 6Mbit/sec for 1080p), AC3 audio, MKV container preferred.
Sell me that, with a fast server to download from and an RSS feed I can automate the process from, for a reasonable price, and I *WILL* buy. Reasonable price would be about half what the season goes for on Blu-Ray. I'm not getting media, packaging, shipping, etc., so I won't pay for it either. And if I'm paying, it must be ad-free. If I'm not paying, or getting a significant discount, ads would be acceptable. I personally wouldn't take any more than about 5min/hour of ads though. If I'm paying, it must also include re-download rights. Perhaps restricted to off-peak, or with a small fee for using up said capacity, but a very small fraction of the original purchase price. I would also require that the episodes be made available by midnight of the original air date. If they want to compete with PirateBay and friends, they have to provide all of the above. People will pay for the convenience, quality, and knowing they are legal. Cause paying customers issues, and they will go elsewhere, or just not bother. The studios have the ability to take the online market by storm and keep it. They just have to step up. Not that they will.
Streaming crap quality with encryption... Not interested.
As a reader of a newspaper, his "customer relationship" is Not My Problem. I do not choose to be the target of marketers' "customer management" fantasies.
TV networks generally have 15 minutes of commercials for every 45 minutes of programming and as loathsome as having that many commercials may be, I'd, personally, rather have that than have to pay $20.00 / month or whatever. And I don't see pirating as a viable alternative, either - however unjustified the penalties for copyright violation may be, the fact remains that if you get caught, you're liable to be fined several thousand dollars.
See subject.
Moderators: Before moderating a comment Insightful/Informative, check to see if a child post has already refuted it.
I won't be paying a dime. There are too many other alternatives to pay for your content AND to watch your commercials. Why not go after a little more commercial revenue like the over the air broadcasters? Not to mention the cat and mouse game that you seem to be playing with my media center software constantly breaking things so people have to go to your crappy website. If you go forward with this you will experience a horrible backlash from your users.
I guess they're not getting enough resale value from those brains they're slurping.
I've already stopped watching them and have stopped using them as demos in my shop. No more recommendations.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
which has the same shows. Why would I pay for this too? I use hulu every now and then. Usually when comcrap's service (which I'm paying for) craps out (the SA HD DVR is a piece of flaming shit). It's nice for when on the road too. But, really, I'm already paying for that content, so why would I pay for it again? I'm sure the cable companies don't want to pay for this... but aren't they already, and that's why they charge us?
Never!
That's the nice thing about magazines. They're really really cheap if you buy 1-year subscriptions. Problem is cable companies charge higher prices and give you the same amount of commercials as OTA TV. It's not like cable companies are using the money to give you premium, cable-only content. Well, of course they do but most of it is crap.
They're pocketing the money. That's not going to change.
Here are the conditions under which I will agree to pay my money for Hulu:
1. No ads in the paid content. AT ALL. Not now, not ever.
2. Cheap, a-la carte subscriptions for individual shows. If I only need a few shows from Discovery, Nickelodeon and Food Network, I should be able to sign-up for only those shows.
3. Compatibility with an inexpensive hardware device of some sort (Apple TV, Xbox or PS3 will do).
4. Content is served in _at least_ 720p with high encoding quality.
These conditions are not negotiable. If all four are fulfilled, I, for one, will welcome our money charging overlords.
..as long as they lose the stupid web-browser-needed part (maie it easy to curl/wget the files) and use nonproprietary formats/codecs. Gimme a way to fill up my mythvideo database with stuff I'm not getting OTA, and you can have some money.
Do you want money? Do you, punk? (Or is your goal to do something other than make money? If money is not your aim, I can oblige you too. I'll find someone else to accept the money, or if no one steps up, there's always the pirates and their great totally free stuff.)
To bad this story is bogus. I was really looking forward to paying money to Hulu AND being forced to watch commercials.
I would pay for Hulu if they let me download ad-free shows to watch later on.
Honestly, why doesn't Hulu develop a P2P service with a business model similar to Napster?
Imagine if Hulu would let you stream online for free with ads, or pay 7$-10$ a month to download the shows through a custom p2p application? I'd gladly pay to be able to take the shows with me on the road. Along with that, they could offset they're costs by using p2p.
This is how I see the future of television. A better version of netflix basically.
napster.. meet hulu..
You guys should get to know each other as you'll be neighbors in the internet cemetery.
No Thanks. If I want to pay to watch content, I might as well sign up for cable or Satellite.
At least it never buffers that way.
I sense a conspiracy.
I've been fond of Hulu since Day One. There's stuff there I like, I send it to my 32 inch Sony HDTV in the living room via a 25' VGA cable to the RGB port. It's pretty good quality (at 480p), which the Sony upconverts to 1080p. I do get smearing from time to time, but it's infrequent enough not to bother me too much.
If Hulu wants my money, however, I'm done. They have advertising....they don't need subscription revenue. Of course, they may WANT more $$$, but I don't feel there's a compelling need to charge for watching old Speed Racer cartoons!
I'll see what they come up with, but right now, it's a non-starter for me.
I am my own gestalt.
...should be ct.hulu.com
ct = content toll.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Assuming ISP's start have usage caps, who is going to seriously double pay for Internet content?
the whole point of having advertising is to not charge for content.
the whole point of charging for content is not having advertising.
having both is the epic fail.
they're going to find out just how fast the consumer rules the Internet.
They're using their grammar skills there.
give me an easy way to get it on my HD tv without jumping through hoops and I might pay for some stuff but not for what they offer now.
I dumped cable and live a-la-web tv. I pay for Netflix streaming and find it is worth it.
If Hulu got rid of the stupid 5 trailing episodes thing and had full catalogs of the shows, got some decent movies, and got rid of the commercials I would pay. I *will not* pay for a special section that gets a few bones thrown in every month or if I have to put up with their 8 commercials over and over and over..holy crap water torture over and over.
Go big, do it right, and I would pay.
When cable first came out and they wanted you to subscribe there was a lot of content with limited interuption. Now there is no difference between cable and free TV except you can pay extra for not being interupted at all (HBO etc). The media companies have not come to terms with the fact that their properties are not as valuable as they use to be. There are other entertainment options like gaming that are attracting peoples attention. It is not that money is not being spent, it is being spent on more and various other things that people find entertaining. The larger companies are finding it hard to adopt hence Sony's call for internet guard rails. Their business models are kaput and they are to big to fail I mean change:0 All I can say is good luck with that. I think we are looking at the next GMs.
The only thing of real value is convenience. But convenienceneeds to have enough value to pay for. You need to make money from the ancillary items. Ads, Disks, shirts, etc . . .
".' He went on to say that he doesn't 'see why over time that shouldn't happen.'"
Becasue people will go to other sources?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm not going to pay $60 a month for the access to the internet and then more money on top of that for content.
$60 a month is about all I'm willing to pay for the whole shebang.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
???
While I can understand your argument in principle, I think you are overvaluing the royalties paid by the cable company to content providers as a portion of the cost to bring that content to you. For the most part the only cost to the cable company is channel integration. I would bet that maintenance of that database is nominal. Content providers make their money off of commercials, but after that, cable companies are pirates of that content. If I remember correctly, the settlement that came from those cases was that cable companies would be required to provide some number of public broadcasting channels for some number of stations they pirate. So after they have built this giant content pipe, they regulate who does and does not connect to their giant data stream in a very simple way, on or off, with very little exception. The exceptions are 1) content where per channel royalties exist (HBO, Cinemax, Encore, whatever), and 2) per program royalties channels(pay-per-view). I would expect that there is some speculation going on and the cable companies pay bulk block rates, bringing the channels cheaper to you (assuming you could even get them some other way) and likely making decent money on the side. BUT, the real business of the cable company is not the content, but the pipe. So cable companies pay for almost nothing but the initial infrastructure cost (plus the bureaucracy involved in that), then customer service, billing, and technicians and the such. One product and one price means low overhead and extremely competitive. One the cost of the infrastructure is paid off, then the money is REALLY good.
So what you pay now is a per month connection fee that for the most part is a portion of the cost to build the system that brings the content to you. Now al a carte is a request to take a very simple system and make it relatively very complicated. More equipment to control and regulate what each customer gets, these systems would of course be much more software based compared to the very dumb light switch service=on/off situation right now. The number of switches now is one per customer, based on did they pay the bill. You are proposing changing that to a number of switches equal to the number of possible customers multiplied by the number of possible channels they ever hope for the system to support (needs to be scalable). The handling of the switches would need to be related an exponentially more complicated billing system very likely bringing in security issues. Think Sigma6, in general, more things involved is always more thing to go wrong. No offense to anyone who works as a technician for a cable company, but at present it really doesn't take much of a rocket scientist to operate these networks, and even if you would disagree, you are talking about increasing the level of technical knowledge by a maintenance exponentially, meaning significantly more training, and significantly higher salaries.
So an exponentially more complicated system that personally I can only imagine would be exponentially more expensive to operate so they can more carefully micromanage their billing scheme based on something that doesn't even impact them. The only cost thing they really pay for and bill you for is infrastructure and maintenance! Why should they care at all which channels you watch? If anything, just for the sake of simplicity alone, they should just meter the time you spend watching tv per television. I think that would correlate much better than which stations you watch with regard to what costs are actually incurred by the cable company, and just embed that into the cost of the installation and you end of with a system that isn't any more expensive on the whole across the entire customer base.
Is $30 really so much? You think it would even be possible to design and implement a system where it would even be reasonable to bring you one channel for < $30/month? I would bet that an al a carte system would have a surcharge of at least $30/month before you even get any channels. The reality is tha
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
be on Boxee?
It's only going to work when all I have to do is plug in the TV that I've just bought and it'll immediately hook up to Digital TV (Freeview in the UK), then I plug in my network connection and it immediately connects to Hulu, YouTube and others and offers them as channels. Until then, how the hell are the majority of people in the next 20 years (40+ years old) supposed to do it?
--- Band: Joey Ultra
What makes this "Insightful?"
Broadcast television is almost entirely supported by advertising. The evangelical religious broadcaster has his own product to sell.
Your PBS station subsists on a lighter diet of adds, foundation grants, government funding and nickel and dime contributions from viewers.
Broadcast is inherently mass media.
Multicast digital might give you sixteen broadcast choices where there were only four before. But that is about the limit.
You have to deliver big numbers or advertisers drift away. When too many advertisers drift away, the screen goes dark.
Competition from cable, satellite, home video, the video game and the Internet makes it very hard to get what you need.
Games and reality shows are cheap to produce. But even WalMart knows that there is only so much room at the bottom.
Historically, the big spenders in television were the automakers, tobacco companies, and brewers.
It's still startling to see Fred Flintstone light it up for Winston. Flintstones Cigarette Commercial
Take major league sports out of the picture, and these props have been mostly kicked away.
Hey News Corp, wake yup! You successfully drew people away from bittorrent and earn revenue through ads. Don't fuck it up now by encouraging everyone to go back to bittorrents, where you receive ZERO revenue!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I want you off the fucking comments, you prick. Don't just be sorry, think for one fucking second. What the FUCK are you DOING? Are you professional or not?
Am I going to walk around and make off-topic shit comments, in the middle of your Canadian threads? Then why the fuck are you posting your shit here? Ah da da dah, no Hulu in Canada, like this in the background. What the fuck is it with you? What don't you fucking understand?
You got any fucking idea about, hey, it's fucking distracting having somebody modding up clutter at the beginning of the fucking comments? Give me a fucking answer! What don't you get about it?
How was it? I hope it was fucking good, because it's useless now, isn't it? Fuck-sake man, you're amateur. CmdrTaco, you got fucking something to say to this prick?
This sounds pretty good, pretty smart. So long as there are no commercials on the site or in the videos, I would gladly pay a fair amount for a TV show. Say, maybe ten cents per episode, or a dollar for a whole season.
Full speed ahead!
Don't bother reading the article. Don't even care about the possible options, just rant on brothers! Declare the providers of HULU to be soul-less monsters! Attack their alien plans!
Yeah, seriously, Slashdotters, learn to take a chill pill. Nobody respects the folks who froth at the mouth.
Ignoring the fact that this "news" is just blog-generated rubbish, personally I'd be quite happy to pay for a streaming service, under the assumption that we had the connection speeds to give suitable content. 720p h264 at 6Mbit (maybe 5Mbit if they really have to stretch it) with AC3 sound, and an open protocol, and that'll be just fine. You need a pretty damn good connection to ensure you get it without problems. The current stuff they have is ridiculously rubbish quality in comparison. Given that the net connections aren't at that level yet, and likely won't be for a while, I'd also be quite happy with downloads - 6Mbit for 720p or 12Mbit for 1080p. Allow me to download in an open container (mkv is fine) and I'll be quite happy to pay the current going rate for Bluray pricing per season (even without all the extras), for the convenience of not having to rip it myself.
If so, sign me up! But if they are looking to have their cake and eat it too by running commercials to paying customers I would not even think about it.
I for one welcome our tentacled video-induced braingoo slurping overlords...
My Conditions would be:
1. Include Premium shows and not just Broadcast shows and B movies
2. Subscription fee would need to be monthly, no Pay-Per-View BS and no limits on how many times i can watch a movie
3. Commercials would either be non-existent or make an option to pay less per month and get limited commertials
As for Hulu itself, i would like to see them include a advertising profile where you can click the type of ads that you are interested in, Watching that commercial to save children in 3ed worlds is not going to make me more likely to donate money.
I'm sorry, this reply is not available in your region.
(summary: fuck Hulu anyhow.)
This would be the largest set back to a fully on-line a-la-carte system that we all dream of. Our providers, unless they offer a-la-carte and FREE(with monthly cable bill) On demand streaming video then it seems that the big cable companies will do whatever they can possible to circumvent this type of system from working.
"which owns a huge portion of Hulu"
huge = 27%
--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulu
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
make it compatible on platforms other than a pc (mobile browsers, ps3, psp, wii, etc) and it might be worth it- it isn't worth it if I have to be tethered to the pc-