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Hulu May Begin Charging For Content Next Year
DJLuc1d tips news that Chase Carey, president and COO of News Corp., has said that Hulu may begin charging for its streamed video content as early as next year. He said at a recent conference that the free-to-air model is not sustainable in the long-term. The Atlantic takes a look at several business models Hulu could employ and wonders how their current advertising system would be involved.
Sometimes I watch Hulu because it's convenient, if they were charging I'd drop them like a hot rock. Tivo is your friend.
Thinking they're going to come out with a charge model isn't as funny as Rupert Murdoch's threats to monetize his web properties, but it's vastly overestimating their importance in the content market.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
A few things jump out at me:
First, to be accurate, it is no different than your friend recording it on VHS and giving a copy of that VHS to you. I am not sure about the legality of that, but since he is making a copy for non-personal use it is probably copyright infringement the same as him making you that copy via torrents would be.
Second, it actually is different. The reason nobody particularly cares about your friend giving you a VHS copy of the show is because the scale is nearly non-existent. It costs him (or you) money to buy the tapes and time to dub them for every copy made. Downloading that same show is a distribution method that would allow one person with very small money (tuner) and time (encoding) investments to provide that video, essentially for free, to thousands and thousands of people with exactly the same effort as it would take them for their own use, or to hand it to their friends. I am not intending to argue for one side or the other in the copyright debate, but the difference is hardly semantic.
And third, if it is wrong to download a movie--and again I am not making any personal judgments--then it is equally wrong to download a TV show. Both can be had from free- or nearly-free mediums, both deprive the producers of potential sales later on. If you do not think that people downloading Show X cuts into not only Show X's viewership and thus ad revenues but also their merchandise like box sets, then you are horribly and irrevocably biased.
It may sound as though I am taking the side of copyright owners; I am not, and a look around my hard drives would probably bear that fact out. I just do not see a reason to pretend there are no consequences to such actions for other parties.