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Hulu For Sale: Is There Good News For Users?
itwbennett writes "The LA Times reports that Hulu, which is jointly owned by Comcast, News Corp., Disney, and Providence Equity, has retained investment banks Guggenheim Partners and Morgan Stanley to help them find a buyer. Yahoo is said to have expressed an interest, but not made a firm offer. But what might this sale mean for users? GigaOm says we can expect to see more ads. But there are also 'indications that free Hulu users will have to be a cable subscriber in order to watch shows the day after they air,' says blogger Peter Smith."
Hopefully if it sells, the new owner gets half a clue about how advertising works. I watch a good bit of Hulu, and mostly see the same half-dozen commercials over and over and over again. I honestly wouldn't mind seeing a few more ads...just so long as they're different ads.
Too successful, so let's sell it and kill it. The whole cable model needs to die, there's no reason to subscribe to hundreds of channels when the technology is in place to stream only the shows you want. I can see having a few sports channels for live events for sports junkies, but give those of us who don't watch sports 24/7 the option to stream the few events we want to watch for cheap. My cable set up is the same: minimum basic, most of what I watch is on Netflix. I tried DSL for a while, but the performance sucked.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
You know, I really like Hulu, but one thing that the cable companies seem to ignore is the ability for people to simply not watch TV.
I am in the growing minority of people that actually do not have a TV service (cable nor satellite) because I find comfort in paying about $10 and getting Netflix while paying nothing and getting a lot of ad-supported content on Hulu.
I do not pirate whatsoever, so I literally only use those services to watch video on demand (although I do buy the occasional DVD and TV series, albeit quite rarely).
These media companies can get me with the ads. Hulu usually even has pretty high quality ones, even if there are two of them where there used to be one. I can live with that. However, I will not pay to have that experience. They did not earn any reason to allow them to double dip.
Now, I wonder how long before this minority starts to grow into such a size that it actually stands out to them. Because the days of charging a monthly, randomly growing amount of money to sell a couple of hundred channels when the person only wants maybe 10 and most of the time it is garbage anyway (how many times do people go channel surfing to try and find something?). I honestly hope that more people start doing what I am doing to force those businesses to start lowering their prices to bring people back.
After all, if they charged consistent, reasonable rates, then this post probably wouldn't even exist. I can afford their plans. I, like many people, just don't feel like the value justifies the cost.
From wikipedia:
As you can see, the folks at Comcast, News Corp, and Disney have found their mark for dumping Hulu.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!