Hulu And Its Success
by David
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If you follow my blog at all, you will know that I have encouraged people to discover and enjoy Hulu. Hulu is an excellent and easy-to-use website with loads of full length, high quality television shows and movies.
And the irony of this is that there may be too many easy-to-watch shows on Hulu. At least according to some television network executives. Apparently, the networks are fearing that the increasing views on Hulu will hurt the real TV viewer numbers and thus hurt their ability to keep advertising revenue.
I found a great article on Wired discussing this matter. Here’s a vital bit:
Kilar, a longtime Amazon exec, knows what the Internet is teaching audiences to expect: The ability to watch any show, day or night. And he’s adept at explaining this new reality in a way that emphasizes its potential. “This is a tectonic shift,” he told me when I profiled Hulu last year for Wired, “and what it does is allow network heads to find the audience they always should have had but couldn’t reach.” But not everybody sees it that way.
A story in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times sums up what he’s facing: Fear. It’s certainly understandable. Television networks, and the Hollywood studios that make programming for them, are experiencing declining ad sales, declining DVD sales, and rising panic. “We have to find ways to advance the business rather than cannibalize it,” said the distribution chief at Turner — a network that refuses to make shows like The Closer available on Hulu and keeps only a few episodes on its own site.
That would be nice, but the problem is that if you don’t cannibalize yourself, somebody else will do it for you. “You can’t protect old business models artificially,” I was told by Peter Chernin, the outgoing president of Fox’s parent company, News Corporation. Television execs who doubt him might want to check with their friends in the newspaper industry.
Or better yet, just look at the paper itself. The same startlingly thin issue of the LA Times that carried the Hulu story featured an article about Craigslist and its policies regarding classifieds, most of which are free. Not so long ago, classified ads were a dependable cash cow for the newspaper business. But yesterday’s Craigslist article was followed, in the print edition, by a mere three pages of classifieds, liberally padded by display ads for the Times itself, with another three pages lurking at the end of the sports section. This for a metropolitan area of nearly 13 million people.
For more, read the full article here: Hulu, a Victim of Its Own Success?
I say go support Hulu as much as you can. The watch anything, anywhere anytime premise is the future, and as the article states, if they don’t utilize this market their shows will be cannibalized without their control.
Thank you for reading Watch Free Movies Online and go support your favorite streaming video website!