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."

Comments

Licensing Fees

[Sonny Yatsen]

I don't know how Hulu would be profitable if sold off by its current owners. Part of the reason it has been profitable is because its owners are also the owners of the shows that are streamed on Hulu. If it's no longer in the hands of Comcast, News Corp and Disney, how could it survive if it also has to pay licensing fees to the IP owners? Hulu being sold can only be bad for their users, I think. Either the range of shows must be cut to avoid the licensing fees, or more ads, or bigger paywalls/subscriptions or any multitude of things to balance out the suddenly appearing higher cost of obtaining the shows.

Re:Licensing Fees

[KingSkippus]

True. And what frustrates me most is that content owners and distributors sit around scratching their heads wondering why people download infringing content so often. Um... Could it be because they have systematically shut off every reasonable legal way of obtaining it?

Well, it was nice while it lasted.

Re:Licensing Fees

[dcollins]

"now we'll have to finding them on random webpages"

We're kind of there already. Hulu has evolved lately to shunt you off to other websites for many/most of its shows (so you land at cbs.com or comedycentral.com, etc., and wind up watching via different, lower-quality, proprietary players).

Re:Licensing Fees

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm sure that the byzantine details would make my brain leak out my ears; but there is almost certainly some sort of internal-cost-accounting mechanism in place, even with Hulu an appendage of the rightsholders.

Since showing them on Hulu reduces, however incrementally, their sale value to other venues(Umm... why would I pay $Xmillion, if my customers can just watch it on hulu?), the Hulu ownership is almost certainly 'charging' for the stuff streamed on Hulu. It may be an actual transaction, with money being charged to Hulu, and hulu making payments from its ad revenue, or it may be an accounting fiction of one flavor or another(the same sort of thing that many large companies use to, say, allocate use of internal IT resources by various departments: No money changes hands as such; but the use of IT services is 'billed' to give a sense of how large the IT budget should be).

Now, this doesn't mean that the selloff won't be accompanied by higher prices/ads/paywalls/whatever, since exactly unheard of to re-arrange things before doing something unpopular, so that blame can be apportioned differently(consider the examples where municipalities lease off toll roads to private corporations, and let them ram through substantial toll increases, rather than take the flack for doing so themselves); but there is no way that the shows were "free" to hulu before.

Re:Licensing Fees

[SethJohnson]

That sort of logic is exactly why Yahoo is a prime candidate for buying Hulu. They're suckers for buying video streaming services without a proper understanding of how it will operate in their own hands. Consider their acquisition of Broadcast.com from Mark Cuban in the late nineties. It was the single deal that made him the billionaire he is today.

From wikipedia:

In April 1999, Yahoo! acquired the company for $5.7 billion in stock and renamed it Yahoo! Broadcast Solutions. Over the next few years Yahoo! split the services previously offered by Broadcast.com into separate services, Yahoo! Launchcast for music and Yahoo! Platinum for video entertainment. Yahoo! Platinum has since been discontinued, its functionality being offered as part of two pay services, AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet and Yahoo! Plus.

As of May 2011, neither broadcast.com nor broadcast.yahoo.com are distinct web addresses; both simply redirect to yahoo.com.

As you can see, the folks at Comcast, News Corp, and Disney have found their mark for dumping Hulu.

Re:Licensing Fees

[iamhassi]

I'm not worried, too many people have gone cable-free, if hulu disappears or gets horribly worse (charging huge fees) someone will come along and offer an alternative. I stopped cable in 2008 and downloaded everything. Hulu allowed me stop downloading and stream. It also introduced me to new shows I had never heard of. I use to use a program called TED (torrent episode downloader) that would automatically seek out new episodes of shows and download them. Hulu meant I didnt need TED anymore but if hulu forced everyone to pay or vanished I'd have no choice. I just started paying for Netflix so I rarely use Hulu anymore anyway, only thing I watch is Colbert.

Re:Licensing Fees

[Idbar]

It's even more bizarre that they pay for broadcasting frequencies, antennas and equipment. But they have the chance of broadcasting shows online at the expense of Hulu's bandwidth and they don't do it. I don't want to watch what and when they want me to watch. I want to watch when I have the time and desired of doing so.

Re:Licensing Fees

[Grizzley9]

Do people still use Hulu? Haven't they figured out that it's a complete ripoff yet? Pay for a service that still inundates you with commercials? Yeah...fuck that.

Every program on Hulu is available with less stress and bullshit elsewhere on the net.

*Not legally. Which is why Hulu has gained the popularity it has.

Re:Licensing Fees

[Kjella]

I am going to have to agree. I see this as the end of one of the best innovations of modern entertainment. Instead of having 1 portal to watch most of the shows people enjoy, now we'll have to finding them on random webpages.

Or one web page that has everything no matter what show you want, where it aired and what country you're in. The TV industry is the last industry to pick up on the whole "globalization" thing.

Re:Licensing Fees

[Andy Dodd]

Another sign that the people running it are out of touch with reality: The 8-day policy on many shows.

Now I can fully understand why one would want to hold off on putting a show online - the content providers would prefer if people watch the (apparently more lucrative) TV commercials over cable or broadcast TV. They want to give people a chance to get one of the "late airings" of the show.

So 5 days or 6 days would make great sense - Miss a show, either catch it later in the week, or catch it on Hulu just before the next episode airs.

But 8 days is dumb - With the prevalence of series with long-running storylines (IMO one of the positive effects of DVRs and online streaming - miss an episode and you're not lost for the entire season any more.), this means that if someone misses a show, they will wind up permanently on a "don't watch it on TV" schedule unless the show skips a week. If you miss one, and it becomes available on Hulu AFTER the subsequent episode airs on TV - why are you going to watch the next episode on TV when you haven't seen the preceding one?

Re:Licensing Fees

[nomadic]

My time is valuable. I'd rather pay $8 a month and get guaranteed access to those few shows I like to watch than waste time hunting down individual shows and dealing with low bandwidth sites.

More ads?

[pyrr]

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.

Re:More ads?

[cwtrex]

If they just put in more ads, I'll be using the commercials for longer breaks outside of the room while the commercials play.

If, however, they allow me to better express my interests so that the commercials they display actually appeal to me, I might actually watch them without any hint of annoyance.

Re:More ads?

[PickyH3D]

That's only because they are stupid.

I know that you recognize it, as do most people on Slashdot, but services are clearly making their way onto the internet. I watch Hulu for all of my current TV needs, and the fact that their ads are so short (usually two per ad-block, and about a minute for the block), I usually actually pay attention to them because I don't have to kill time to go do something else as I do with traditional TV commercials, which take up literally a third of the show.

For that reason alone, they should be higher value than normal commercials with the caveat that less people (currently) are watching them.

Don't Care

[SilverHatHacker]

I live in Canada, you insensitive clod! I haven't cared about Hulu for years!

It sounds to me one of those.

[jellomizer]

Oh no! Our new product idea is too popular that it going into our core business. Lets dump it so we can kill it at someone else expense.

I don't think many really like Broadcast TV but they just like the shows. Cable was popular because back in the days because you paid for the service you got commercial free content, then reduced commercial, as well more stations to choose from.
Now they have often more commercials then broadcast TV, there are more channels however most of them are duplicates to each other. Standard, HD, Digital Standard, Digital HD. Or things Discovery 1 2 3 4 which the higher number has the same show that number seasons back. It has became a complete mess.

I have Basic Basic Cable (Broadcast stations that come in clear and 2 or 3 cable stations $10 per month) and Internet threw my cable company. Then I use Netflix for the rest.

I'll pay to get rid of ads.

[odin84gk]

I HATE ads. HATE.

I am willing to pay more for ad-free TV. Hulu seemed like the perfect platform, but they wouldn't shut up and take my money. Cable companies offer DVR's for an extra $5 to $10 a month, which seems equivalent to paying for TV without ads.Why can't Hulu do the same? I never did Hulu+ because it still contained ads.

Businesses are so focused on selling ads that they forget about just using paid subscriptions. Sure, ads provide income above and beyond the subscription, but if you are trying to grow, you need to offer something better than what everyone else does.

Life is too short to spend it watching ads. That is why I love watching old shows using Netflix.

Re:I'll pay to get rid of ads.

[MetalliQaZ]

If you live near a densely populated area, you could ditch the cable, get over-the-air HDTV, and use a do-it-yourself timeshifting solution using a PC. Combined with Netflix, you'd be golden. If I lived alone, this is what I would do.

Re:Nothing of value lost

[h4rr4r]

There is nothing preventing you from hooking an HDMI cable from your computer to your TV. Sure you might have to run it through a wall, but you can do it or pay less than a couple hundred to have someone do it.

I laugh when hulu says that this is not available on TVs, since I always see that on my TV which as it is just being used as a monitor for my ps3 and PC.

I would pay for hulu plus, if it dropped ads. I would also pay for cable if it dropped ads. At this point I will just stick with netflix and not paying for cable nor hulu.

Less TV

[PickyH3D]

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.

Re:Good News For Me

[1u3hr]

And me. I don't complain they won't let me stream full shows, I have other ways to do that. I do get really pissed off when various TV and movie news sites have previews and interviews and all I can see is a big FUCK OFF FOREIGN LEECH message from Hulu, and I have to search to see if it's been copied by someone to YouTube. If Hulu becomes even more limited then news sites wouldn't use it by default.

Re:Nothing of value lost

[Grizzley9]

Another option are services like PlayOn that stream it through your DNLA device over your wireless network. Works great for us and no need to buy Hulu+.

Civil disobedience?

[gottabeme]

You have a point.

But an interesting counterpoint is that the cable TV model is fundamentally broken. Subscribers pay far more than the cost to provide the service from the cable office to the wall socket--they pay money that goes to the companies that own the channels--but they are still fed commercials.

The whole point of ad-supported TV is that, as with over-the-air broadcast networks since the beginning, the commercials finance the programming. But cable networks aren't satisfied with that--they want more and more money, so they sell commercials and charge subscribers, too. They want to have their cake, eat it, and have some pie and eat it, too. It's a never-ending, greed-fueled hunger for infinite growth. It's unsustainable; but rather than accept that fact, the megacorps resort to harsher and greedier measures to try to extract more and more money from the public. They're just never satisfied.

Honestly, I'm surprised that they still sell DVDs of movies and TV shows, because that is a one-time sale. I imagine that in 5-10 years, as Internet connections become faster, they will become reluctant to offer one-time sales of anything, instead opting for only rentals with short viewing windows.

So, given the unending greed and corruption of media conglomerates and the government agencies that cater to their every whim, what is John Q. Public to do? He can a) give them what they want: more and more of his hard-earned money, while receiving less and poorer-quality and more expensive services; or b) abstain from their content entirely; or c) use alternative means of acquiring their content. Is option C illegal? Perhaps. Are the relevant laws that protect the greedy corporations at the expense of the citizens of the nation ethical or moral? Perhaps not. Is the government that passes such laws still beholden to its citizens, or to said corporations? Is it still possible for its citizens to effect reform against the wishes of the corporations? If it's not possible, then is civil disobedience immoral? If the corporations are acting unethically and immorally, is it wrong to use technical measures to counter their undermining of the Constitution?

I agree with you that we should all spend less time watching TV and more time doing productive things in our lives--myself included--but these are still valid questions. At what point do we, being powerless to legislatively oppose the greedy, immoral, unethical media corporations, workaround their evil by using the technical measures that are--at the moment--available to us?