Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

> I think the industry should do what Hulu has done over the past 5 years. Give the product away virtually for free, collect an enormous user base while you starve/kill the demand for the equivalent torrents, slowly increase the price of the service until you find equilibrium, then profit.

Not going to happen. The television/media industry is addicted to the ad rates you get from traditional television, and have to put many more ads into online content to receive the same revenue (hence why so many Hulu ads). So the balance is, how painful (# of ads) do you make it before your average Joe figures out RSS + Torrent Client + RSS Feed?

View on HN

> Not going to happen. The television/media industry is addicted to the ad rates you get from traditional television, and have to put many more ads into online content to receive the same revenue

I know there's a reason (traditional ad rates, etc.) - but I don't understand the disparity between online and television advertising rates.

If anything online advertising would seem to be significantly more powerful since you can build customized profiles about the viewers (vs. only having a Nielsen chips in every so many households) and broad TV show audiences.

That's exactly why it's less "valuable" online. The fact that analytics tell you exactly how much value you get from it is the problem. Compare that to TV: you only have bullshit statistics that are honestly crap, but the allure and history is more important.

Compare startups with no revenue getting bought or valued for far more than startups that do. Same concept.

None of what you made makes sense.

Why wouldn't pirates just go back to pirating when the price increases for the service? If pirating with RSS feed + torrent client is so easy, why would they move to the legit service in the first place?

> Why wouldn't pirates just go back to pirating when the price increases for the service? If pirating with RSS feed + torrent client is so easy, why would they move to the legit service in the first place?

A Hulu Queue is more convenient than pirating I would think, but once you have to spend greater than X time on ads, you'd rather deal with the hassle of pirating. Just speculation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com