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.

Comments

I'd pay it

[FredFredrickson]

I'd pay for it - if they stopped being dicks.

That means, if I could watch it on my xbox 360 (either official support, or they stop playing cat and mouse with playon.) and put support for hulu on the roku.

Ever since the last update, playon has had to do a screen capture instead of decrypting the original stream. That gets far less performance and kills my server.

Also I have to point out that the article mistakenly compares paying $10 for hulu (on demand) vs just watching it on "tv for free". I wonder if the author of the article still lives in his mom's basement.

Re:I'd pay it

[MightyMartian]

I'd pay for it if they made it available outside the US.

Re:I'd pay it

[MBGMorden]

That's about where I'm at on it too. I like the idea of Hulu, but I simply don't want to watch TV sitting at my computer monitor. In the past I've kept a regular computer hooked to the TV and just used the regular interface to pull stuff up, but it's just gotten frustrating to keep a mouse and keyboard by the TV. If they can't integrate it into something I can use with a remote (Windows Media Center, MythTV, Xbox 360, anything), then I'm just not bothering. I'm ESPECIALLY not subscribing.

It's a shame though. If they managed to partner with some of these services I'd happily pay $10 a month for it. It beats the heck out of a $60 per month satellite bill.

Re:I'd pay it

[Anonymous Coward]

Note: I work for a telecom regulatory body in Canada.

Hulu is being blocked at every turn. Certain companies in Canada are attempting to stop Hulu from entering the market.

Why not try a proxy? I run a private proxy on one of my servers based in the U.S.

Re:I'd pay it

[Fnkmaster]

Completely agreed - I'd pay it too, if they'd put it on my Roku. I love Roku and all the Netflix and Amazon content (and some of the other content is okay, but not exactly worth much), but it would be *the* killer set-top box with Hulu content.

However, the problem as I understand it though isn't that Hulu are being dicks, it's that the licensing terms they've been able to negotiate simply don't allow them to put content on set-top boxes or even make it easy for set-top boxes to access that content.

I just don't think big media is going to let that content go to Roku or any equivalent set-top box. I mean, you'd have people canceling their subscriptions to cable right and left if that started happening. You can do it now, but you need an HTPC setup and to navigate to Hulu via a browser, and that's not quite mass-market.

Re:I'd pay it

[causality]

I use Boxee in this case as there is some integration made for Hulu. Problem I see with Hulu is the limited number of shows (incomplete full seasons).

I wish they'd delete every 4-minute "excerpt" clip and use the space to host more complete episodes, myself. I never knew that brief clips from the middle of a show with little or no context were so popular, yet they are a large amount of the offerings on Hulu and a *majority* of the available videos on Adultswim.com.

Re:I'd pay it

[nine-times]

It's a shame though. If they managed to partner with some of these services I'd happily pay $10 a month for it. It beats the heck out of a $60 per month satellite bill.

... and that's why you won't see it happen. Hulu is run by the TV networks, and the TV networks still want the money from Cable/Satellite. If they make their content available online, it might become a competitive market. Instead of charging $10/month on Hulu, they'd rather lock you into paying $100/month on cable.

Re:I'd pay it

[justin12345]

My only problem with Hulu is that they don't have enough ads. Or I suppose I should say enough advertisers. It gets very annoying seeing the same double-pits-to-chesty Axe ad 20 odd times over 5 episodes of something. I have to say they have been better about it lately, though it can still be a problem sometimes.

Re:I'd pay it

[billcopc]

No need to protect the guilty, Bell and Rogers are attempting to stop Hulu from entering the market, because they know the first thing that will happen is users will blow their unreasonably low caps and yell at CS reps until their useless little heads explode.

The last thing the Canadian Duopoly wants is a legitimate use for all the bandwidth they've been keeping from us.

Cheaper and better than cable

[Enderandrew]

For some people this really is a great alternative to cable.

It might even be better for networks. Fox said they make more money from Hulu on Simpsons episodes than they do from airing them on TV. And that was before this subscription revenue model existed.

If it wasn't for sports, I'd consider canceling cable/sattelite and just watching content via the internet.

Re:Cheaper and better than cable

[TheRaven64]

All its going to take is an ISP throttling bandwidth passing from Hulu because it is causing "Network Congestion" before its a lawsuit

It's a brave corporation that is willing to get between an American and his TV...

Ads

[Varkrag]

Sorry, but if I became a paying subscriber I would expect ad free viewing on all content.

Re:Ads

[Beelzebud]

Once upon a time the promise of cable TV was that there would be no commercials.

Too bad TV viewers are mostly lazy, because when they started airing commercials on paid TV, no one seemed to get outraged about it.

Re:Meh.

[MightyMartian]

Because the odds of me getting a letter stating that I need to deliver my left nut to the MPAA's legal department or be run over by their legal team are considerably less likely going through something like Hulu than TPB.

International Hulu?

[l2718]

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 ...

Get back to me

[SCHecklerX]

... When they properly support my phone and my 64 bit linux box. Oh, and allow boxee clients. Then we will talk about me paying them for a service that I can actually use.