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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.
new headline: Hulu may begin loosing viewers next year.
And their user base drops to 3 men and a dead dog.
According to this media journalist (http://gizmodo.com/5388745/how-a-paid-hulu-would-work):
"Hulu, the joint venture between News Corp.'s Fox, GE's NBC Universal and Disney's ABC, doesn't plan on charging people to watch the stuff it's currently airing on the site-a mix of first-run shows from broadcast TV, a limited number of cable TV shows and a smattering of movies. But Hulu is trying to figure out how to create some kind of premium offering where you'll pay for stuff that isn't on the site right now."
If true, I think that is completely OK. A mix of free ad-supported content with premium high-quality content people are willing to pay for. Not sure how that would work currently, but HBO has proven people are happy to pay for *quality* programming.
I wouldn't mind paying for the two to three shows per week I watch on hulu.com, but then if I have to pay I don't want to sit through ads. Wonder how they'll work that out?
Caveat Utilitor
if it is composed as bits, and it is consumed as bits (books, music, movies/ tv), consumers will pay nothing or very little for it
this is the future, deal with it
and no dear content panic brigade: plenty of books, music, movies/ tv will still be made. high quality and at high cost. as if free internet content is a threat to content creation: it isn't, its free adertising for the creators. music is consumed at concerts, movies in cinemas, and books in beds/ trains. and this makes cash as well as a whole huge range on ancillary streams: endorsements, toylines, speeches, movie script treatments, spokesperson, etc...
what kind anarchist communist thinking is this?
gee, i dunno. its called the business model that saw the rise of radio, and sustained television for free over the airways for decades: ADVERTISING. you give your content away FOR FREE, and your content is supported by ANCILLARY STREAMS OF REVENUE. you don't put moronic tollbooths that are broken anyways on top of access to your content. no one is going to pay it, you'll just make a lot less money than if you provided free access and depended on ancillary streams
do you think the business model of radio and television in the 1950s is some antiamuricun socialism? no? then why are your panties in a twist over free digital content?
but go ahead hulu, reduce your viewership by a thousandth or a millionth. you're geniuses, really, we can bring the business model of vinyl and cassette tapes to the internet. yeah, go for it
fucking morons
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...just wasn't profitable enough.
That's a shame, because my fiancée and I have really enjoyed Hulu, as it's allowed us to watch our favorite shows (those that Hulu carries, anyway) on our own schedules, and with short commercial breaks, and no banner ads across the lower quarter or third of the screen. It's proven to be kind of an ideal version of television. (We've never had on-demand or DVR, just expanded basic cable, so take that with as many grains of salt as you wish.)
Speaking for myself, the continual, intrusive advertising that plagues television today has done much to drive me away from it, but Hulu has succeeded in bringing me back. I really don't mind that much when the ads are at most a minute long (sometimes as short as 10-15 seconds), and only one at a time.
Meanwhile, we're taking a wait-and-see approach to what happens next. There's no telling what Hulu will charge, but if it's reasonable (define that how you will) and serves to, say, buy CBS's participation, it could still be a worthy thing.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
Let me ask you, do you currently subscribe to a TV service (cable | satellite) or would you in the absence of hulu? Personally, I used to have cable until I started watching hulu for free. The packages for the former were kinda silly, where one had to pay >90$ for ~100 channels they didn't want or 10$ for a stripped down service. If hulu did start charging, I could see a small subscription fee for unlimited access or commercials with limited access (most recent shows only?) as reasonable. However, they are going to have a hell of a time in moving to a pay model. Many of their more popular shows can be obtained on itunes for a nominal fee or are already available on a given show's website or parent network site: ABC, Comedey Central, CBS, Fox, etc (albeit with crappier flash players and bandwidth). I would like to see hulu make it as a viable, self-sustaining service, if for nothing other than to give current cable providers some competition. I just think they're going to have a hard time at it.
What media center hacks? I use it on my HTPC. It works as well as any other media player/center. Just download the Hulu Desktop app (OS X/Windows/Linux) Just launch it and go. I wonder if those folks realize exactly how easy it is to watch this stuff on a TV? I would actually consider canceling cable if they had just a bit more content that was good.
They should ditch the youtube 'clips' and stick to full TV shows and movies. They could also jettison a lot of IMO, useless content. Get some good deals with content providers with exclusive 15, 30, and 60 second commercials if you need to.
It's a good service, but it does need more polish.
hulu.com
This domain is for sale! Click here to register!
Too late to be known as Bush the First, he's sure to be known as Bush the Worst.
if it is composed as bits, and it is consumed as bits (books, music, movies/ tv), consumers will pay nothing or very little for it
If that were true, iTunes would be an utter failure. But it's booming, selling a lot of music but also a lot of video content.
If you look the prices are actually pretty high ($1.99 for SD, $2.99 for HD television shows). But people buy it - because of convenience and quality.
I've tried Hulu a few times but honestly I can't even tolerate the minimal advertising they have, and either tape shows off the air or buy some from iTunes for stations I cannot get. The only time I turn to the universal "free" option is when a publisher is so dense as to not offer something on iTunes.
Yes there will always be people who choose the free option, but if you give consumers a chance to pay for convenience a lot will.
That said I don't think paid Hulu will do well at all. It's pretty damn inconvenient to watch streaming video already (with or without commercials), since you can't (without technical know-how) shift it to portable devices at all, and if you want to re-watch something it may just be gone. At least when they yank content from iTunes you as a consumer can keep on using what you bought, which is probably as close to replication of physical media rules as we are likely to get.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sorry Hulu, but calling it the "free-to-air" model is dubious at best. Any time we are receiving advertising over websites/TV/radio/Hulu, we are a product being delivered to advertisers.
Hulu, you run plenty of ads. The idea that you are not making any money, or that your service is free in any sense beyond the most narrow interpretation, is absurd.
Not true, almost all around
First of all, I don't remember ever "no ads" being the selling point of cable. When I first saw cable back around 1979, it was because the transmission towers were so far away from our rural neighborhood in a valley that we couldn't get a signal with an antenna. Literally nothing. "Cable" to us meant that we got to pay for what everyone else was watching: broadcast television.
Second of all, when they did start adding a few paltry non-broadcast stations to cable television, I remember ads from the outset. Oh, sure, you had the "premium" stations like HBO that had no ads, but guess what--they were really expensive, and we didn't get those channels, and we watched ads. Fewer than today, granted, but that was true even of broadcast television and is a trend across the board.
Third of all, I don't see us ever going back to the way things were, with big content providers having an absolute lock on when, where, and how you watch big content. Too many genies are out of too many bottles for that to happen. The providers now have two excruciatingly difficult competitors to face: media pirates and entertainment alternatives.
Yes, as much as we like to pretend that media pirates don't have that big an impact on the industry, they really, really do. Fortunately, in many ways, it's positive. I mean, think about it, do you really think that a service like Hulu would exist today if big media didn't have to contend with people downloading their stuff for free? Their value added is no longer the fact that they have complete control over the pipeline. It's all about ease of use and legitimacy. If they stop providing that value added service, then people will still simply stop using their service.
Added to this pressure is the fact that the times they are a-changin'. Back when I was little, we didn't have the Internet. We really didn't have many good video games. (I grew up in the Atari 2600 age.) The television was THE home entertainment medium. At night, it was either watch television or sit around talking to your parents. (Fun.)
But now with all of our instant communication technology, the Internet as our kids' playground, and gaming systems that are more hi-tech than the most expensive supercomputers I grew up on, television has a fraction of the relevance that it once did. Look around, man. Between cell phones, the Internet, their World of Warcraft accounts, and their Xboxes, a lot of kids don't even watch television!
Do you really think that people will be paying for access to shows riddled with ads on top of ads? I don't. I think that they'll just find something more interesting to do, some alternative that we didn't grow up with, thus the reason we were so willing to put up with that crap. Big media will either adjust, with services like Hulu, or die. And they know that, so please, finger off the panic button.
Cable and Sat have gotten out of control, I don't watch enough tv to necessitate 1000+ channels while paying $50-$75/mo for it.
I canceled my cable a few months ago and have been souly utilizing Netflix for my viewing needs via my xbox360. If hulu starts offering direct streaming services and in HD, via xbox, ps3 and/or web for all of its television content like netflix does for movies I would be willing to pay $5-$10-$15/mo for it and wouldn't mind some ad support. Unchanged though, I wouldn't consider paying for it.
I'd pay for Hulu if it was a very reasonable price with a very good selection of stuff, with no or very few advertisements. If it has a good selection there's STILL no reason to buy cable when you can watch what and when you want to watch. In my opinion, Cable Television as we know it isn't going to be sustainable in the long term, either, because people are increasingly DVRing and downloading and stuff nowadays anyway and the old advertisement scheme just isn't as viable as it once was. Cable emerged and appeared the way it did because the internet was not really fully realized the way it is now and certainly not with today's bandwidth. The old cable network model is slowly on the way out. Hulu at cost, a decent cost, will be a bargain over the old cable networks still because I can watch any (available) episode of, say, Babylon 5 when I want, where I want, without having to wait for network showings.
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
I almost want them to sell show-based subscriptions. Or allow me to donate money to the show balance. I am worried that the fact that I religiously watch a few particular shows is not counted in the rating of the show and that might lead it to die. Perhaps if people could pay for subscriptions, we could have saved Firefly before it got canceled!
Of course I would probably want a view without ads if I am going to pay money for a subscription...
Mininova doesn't have its own tracker... i.e. anything you get from Mininova actually comes from somewhere else, most often TPB.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Broadcast networks have existed for more than fifty years on a model that had massive overhead but was free to any user within range of the signal. Now, there is a way they can provide their same product via the internet with massively lower overhead, but they can't figure out how to make money like they used to? Or even make money at all? Did these guys all go to the school with an MBA program that taught them to find a stable company that looks like it would run on autopilot, and just cash the checks as long as the good times last?
The problem is figuring out what people will put up with. Some people will be willing to put up with more adds or subscription fees. Some won't
Hulu, as it stands now, is reasonable (though their selection is way too small). If they ever ask for a credit card (paypal, etc), they will instantly lose a huge percentage of their clients, including me. If they increase the number or length of commercials by much, they will drive many back to their DVR and VCR (or online downloads).
They have an appealing concept working for them right now. They need to decide exactly why it is that they aren't making their original projections. I suspect they just don't have much that people want to watch. Perhaps the general public simply hasn't heard about them (an advertizing problem). Whatever the issue, you only resort to driving away your viewers when you're desperate. If they "over-correct", they will crash and burn.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
First of all, I don't remember ever "no ads" being the selling point of cable.
Just because you don't remember it that way, it did not happen like that?
I remember it, and the 'no commercials' was THE marketing hype for cable. It only lasted a year or two, but it was definitely the angle they used to market this 'new cable service' back in the beginning.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Uhhh, yeah. Why don't you take the minute to download and try it before clogging up slashdot with stupid questions.
Because one answer here prevents 1000+ people from having to download and try it.