Hulu announces monthly subscription, support for iPhone/iPad, still ad supported
readwriteweb.com
readwriteweb.com
The co-workers in question are female non-techs, so perhaps it is a demographic thing.
It states: "To support themselves, some cable channels charge "subscriber fees" in addition to airing commercials. These fees are collected directly from the cable service provider, who passes the cost onto the customer."
So you are correct, at least about some portion of the stations.
* $10 movie ticket - I see ads before the movie
* $70/month cable - I see ads on every channel but PBS
* $50 sport ticket - I see ads all over the field
* $60 Pay Per View - I see ads all over the place and the announcers spewing ads whenever they can
The media companies need to start competing with Bittorrent on actual quality of service, like Apple did. If the illegal route is that much more pleasant than the legit way, something is wrong with your business.
Seeing ads at the movies and in other things I pay for does really burn my ass, though.
Sorry, I don't mean to single you out. This is definitely more generally directed.
Sidenote: Cable comes on a TV; Hulu comes on a computer. Does this matter to you personally? Likely not, you're a tech person and would have no issue working around that to get your preferred service on your preferred platform. But most people aren't you, and for them, that difference is called a barrier to consumption. This is the same reason IE remains the majority internet browser. It's the easiest thing in the world to just download another, better browser. But some 60% of the US refuses to. Well, they don't refuse to. They just don't think about it.
But really, if people wanted ad free content it would cost ten times as much as it does because they are making deals with other business to acquire their content. At $10 a month though its cheaper to me than pirating because of convenience. I guarantee I would save myself much more than the monthly price by cutting the time it takes to find a good torrent to download the entire backlog of a show I want to watch.
On another note, all the people who interject "I don't watch/have a TV" in every bloody conversation would probably love this, regardless of how large a demographic they comprise. Are we assuming that Hulu will have to satisfy all types of consumers for it to be a good idea, or are you just chiming in with your own, perfectly reasonable, arguments? I just don't know how useful the "I won't get it, therefore it is a bad idea" is and how it reflects Hulu's strategy.
How does this function?
I really don't know if the media companies know just how much they have already lost - at this point most of the under 30 crowd downloads without even the tiniest feeling that perhaps, just maybe, they shouldn't or the companies deserve payment for what they have created.
At this point their only hope is to make it more convenient than piracy, which is possible to do now but won't in a couple of years and then slowly ween people away from free content.
If I recall well, the guy is trying to escape advertising bots of some kind.
There's a trend toward "paid + ads". It may soon become the norm to pay premium plans only to get rid of ads, in the OS, on your phone (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/27/windows_phone_7_ads/).
I wonder if the iDevice had Flash, would they be able to do this?
Maybe if this was more along the lines of a $36 annual fee, similar to Pandora, I would give it more thought.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/20/flash-10-1-for-android-be...
The "problem" is that apparently mobile devices have to be licensed differently, and presumably more expensively. Which is, I presume, why you have to pay $10 a month to still have to endure ads on your iPhone.
In Hulu's case they are able to measure the number of people actually watching the videos.
Also if anything a paid subscriber would probably be less likely to pay attention to the ads, making the ad worth less.
Having played around with it (I hacked together a gnash+ffmpeg port that's just sufficient to run Hulu on my own iPhone), they just have some logic in their flash scripts to prevent playing on unlicensed platforms. And in order to prevent direct linking to the FLVs, they use some obfuscating logic -- namely, they give you a string + a key and have you perform an AES-style operation using the two locally to get a time-expiring key to the file you want to play. They change the obfuscating pattern just often enough to make it annoying if you were, say, trying to keep up a Boxee script or update an AppStore application.