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Rumors of Hulu's Subscription Plans
whychevron found a story discussing Hulu's plan to offer subscriptions. The rumor is that $10 a month will grant paying users the ability to get episodes older than the last five, while the current five episodes remain ad-supported. This starts pitting Hulu even more squarely against iTunes for anyone who watches more than a few shows a month.
Sorry, but if I became a paying subscriber I would expect ad free viewing on all content.
The real news we are all waiting for is for Hulu to start offering world-wide viewing.
In the pre-internet world where movies and TV programs were received by radio or cable or seen in a theater or rented on a videocasette it made sense for the rights holder to subdivide the rights based on location -- to license separately in each country. But this makes no sense for internet broadcast. You would think that in the future rights owners would exclude internet rights from the licenses which are exclusive in a geographical region (thus allowing services like Hulu to license world-wide internet rights), but this doesn't seem to be happening. Instead, the internet broadcast rights are included in the country-specific deals, which generally means that potential viewers outside the US get no service.
By the way -- this is why I feel no compunction about downloading "pirated" versions of shows that are not available in my country. If the studio refuses to sell me a product, they can't complain when I don't pay for it ...