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

[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

[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?

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.

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.

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.