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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.'"
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.
Many of us outside the US can't use Hulu anyway; so it doesn't matter ;-)
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
Well- they don't exactly "give away their content for free forever" .
Commercials are interspersed throughout every movie and show. Also, for most shows, they only make a handful of episodes available at a time.
My biggest frustration with Hulu today is their use of horrendously inefficient and technically inferior player implementations.
Adobe Flash Player is a resource hog - I've had issues with 720p video playing smoothly even on a Core 2 Quad with a GeForce 9800GT under Linux.
The same video plays smoothly on my old Athlon XP 2800+ with a GeForce 7800GS if I use rtmpdump on a CBS high def stream and then play it back with mplayer. (Not an available option for Hulu.)
If they used a player that were:
1) As cross-platform as the existing solution (MacOS, Linux, Windows - this kills Silverlight for which Linux support typically lags at least one full version behind on)
2) Played back 720p video smoothly on my old Athlon XP 2800+ and 480p video smoothly on my Asus Eee 1000HE.
I would consider a subscription if reasonably priced and ads were removed. I would NOT consider pay-per-view.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Four?
There are a LOT more infomercial channels than that. I used to subscribe to an 80 channel cable service. One night, around 1:30AM, I counted that over 75% of those channels were broadcasting infomercials. The cable companies are double-dipping. The infomercial businesses have to pay cable to get their ads on cable, and the consumer has to pay to watch them.
I got tired of it and dropped my cable service. I got a converter for my one analog TV and and built to HD antennas as decribed on the YouTube video, They worked great! I was able to receive 16 over-the-air HD channels, which is all that are broadcast where I live. At 1:30AM half of them are off the air, and of the eight remianing one broadcasts the weather radar all night, one pumps out news, and the other six dispense infomercials. That's still 75%, but I don't have to pay for them or watch them.
After I dropped my cable tv I purchased just a 10Mb/s Internet connection with another ISP. When I have an itch to watch something I usually use HULU. I pay $10/y for ad free access to the wunderground.com weather site, which isn't bad. If I had to pay $10/y for access to, say, the Science Channel, History Channel, Discovery Channel, NASA channel and the Military Channel, for a total of $50/y, that wouldn't be too bad. It would sure beat the $129/mo I was paying RoadRunner for a 7Mb/s Internet connection and 80 channels, most of which I didn't watch.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
No, it's because of exclusive redistribution contracts with foreign media companies. They could find plenty of international advertisers and even national advertisers using IP location services just like everything else on the web. The problem is that the media companies have divided up the world into a ton of little markets and their existing contracts don't allow them to do internet based distribution. It's an old business model that will change over time but it could take quite a while.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
It'll change when somebody offers something better. Fiber service is helping in some areas... competition is a wonderful thing. If only people didn't use their video content provider as their ISP, I think competition would be even better. Nothing like the cable cos (and the telcos who offer fiber) limiting internet volume to keep people from downloading their video content.
There are a lot of IFs, such as:
...IF regulatory hurdles to video content delivery are manageable
...IF distribution is separated from content production (this, IMO, is the biggest hurdle -- the networks are canceling shows that they don't produce, in favor of less-popular but self-produced shows that are more profitable).
...IF a retailer of video programming is able to negotiate deals with enough of the content producers to have a decent selection.
I see video content as being where music was 10 years ago, except that more of the producers have limited online official distribution.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Also, they need to make thier "full screen" HD look like HD. On my 1i1 19" 1440X900 monitor it looks worse than SD television.
Not true.
It's MUCH more complicated than that.
I think you'll find (rather quickly) that the whole point of having ads and the whole point of charging for content are one and the same.
($)
I don't believe I've seen a claim that its HD. The button on the side says it toggles between 320p and 480p