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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.
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.
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.
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
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Too late to be known as Bush the First, he's sure to be known as Bush the Worst.
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.
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...
The free option, available only to USA residents.
Yes, I'd love to watch some of the stuff available on Hulu, but no... due to "Copyright" it's not available in my country.
Wait... what? There is no technical limitation, there's no financial limitation, there's no business limitation... unless the company behind Hulu is extremely dense or has absolutely no clue about marketing.
Or do you want to get into the fact that shows on Sky and Virgin media or other satellite/cable providers in the UK & Europe are shown as little as 3 months after, is this all about a gentlemans agreement to keep a monopoly profitable when it should've died years ago?
When marketing & politics get involved, especially in issues like this, expect the fucking worst.
By the time Hulu gets around to allowing Europeans to view stuff we'll have to not only pay a fee, but also sit through 5-10% in duration of advertising for local Cable/Satellite companies which offer a worse service.
Anyway, I have to go change the proxy settings in Firefox so I can watch some stuff on Hulu, brb.
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?
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.
The simple fact of the matter is that most of these industires are locked into a model that made some sense back when it was started. Regional versions of products often made sense because of either local requirements (Different line voltage and frequency) different safty regulations, and the fact that not long ago it was prohibitively expensive to import something on a one off basis, and still for most items, ording from overseas can be pretty expensive, but still potentially viable for a consumer.
So in may industries we got a developer/designer, potentially a separate manufacturer, importers, distributors, etc. Creative efforts often had a separate producer too.
Content like television had a modified version of this model, where exclusive complete exploitation rights for some franchise in a limited geographical area is sold to another company. Producers often completely lack the rights to authorize sites like Hulu to show content outside the US, since they sold those rights already. Back when these sorts of deals first came out, this was because the producer would find it very difficult to negotiate broadcast agreements with channels overseas. There were just too many, with language barriers, and limited communication speeds. Under such a system both parties had something to gain. The regional rights holder could negotiate broadcast agreements with much more ease, and get profit through this. The production company would get revenue from overseas broadcasts which woiuld otherwise simply not not occur.
The model has become so entrenched, that I'm not sure that a production company could possibly keep enough rights to authorize international streaming, while still getting the shows aired overseas, since channels overseas are used to dealing with local rights holding companies when negotiating for broadcast rights, and would be reluctant to negotiate the rights directly with the producers, if they even are allowed to, by the contracts they have with the local rights holding companies. In this day and age, it is far more feasible for a producer to directly negotiate broadcast rights with overseas channels, so the benefit to them of the international rights holders have diminished greatly, but they are still around.
In the modern age of globalization and global connectivity, political borders should have little meaning when it comes to products or content, but many industries are locked into the old models, with little hope of changing in the short term. There are no few to no gentlemens agreements here, mostly just shortsightedness on the parts of many parties, and quite a few binding contracts where the the company with exploitation rights is not willing to let the contract be withdrawn. (As they now clearly have the better end of the deal, while originally the deal was fair or perhaps in the other direction). Combined with the existing system being so entrenched bypassing it is almost impossible, we get the nasty mess that we have.
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