Hulu Has More Viewers Than Time Warner Cable | Hacker News Reader

Hulu Has More Viewers Than Time Warner Cable

businessinsider.com

35 pointsfromedome18 comments

I wonder how many of those hulu users were on Time Warner's internet service?

Not only that, how many of them subscribe to time warner cable television.. most people watching hulu who have had cable/satellite have not given up their digital boxes for the internet.

To say that Hulu has more viewers than TWC is misleading. The graph is comparing apples to oranges. The "reach" for the cable companies is the number of subscribed households multiplied by the average number of people per house. Hulu's reach is the number of unique visitors.

Even assuming that (subscribers * average people per house) is a good estimate, unique visitors is certainly not.

If a household has five residents (two parents and three children, for example), and each of them are watching Hulu at home, the parents are watching at work during their lunch hour, and the children are watching it at school, then they will collectively count as 6 reaches for Hulu, but only 2.59 reaches for TWC.

To add to this, this statistic is also misleading because it doesn't mention HOW LONG viewers watch for. My guess is the average Hulu visitor watches 1/10-1/50 (or less) the amount of programming that a Time Warner subscriber does. Think about how much video the average person watches on their computer vs. on their television.

Hulu is awesome and even more so lately, as they have added Disney content (ABC, History Channel).

This Five Years on Mars re: the rovers is great programming http://www.hulu.com/watch/91800/naked-science-five-years-on-.... I have not had cable in years since BitTorrent and now things like Hulu!

Can someone who knows the ins and outs of the advertising business tell me why advertising seconds are worth more on TV than online for the same content?

It sounds like advertisers are paying Hulu a lot less per viewer reached compared to cable providers. This is counter-intiutive since the PC audience is paying more attention to the ads in comparison.

I don't know anything about advertising but I do remember this article making the rounds a while back

http://gizmodo.com/5302448/advertising-during-the-simpsons-m...

I think this summarizes the issue:

... remember that Hulu has only 37 seconds of ads per "30-minute" show while a Fox broadcast includes a whopping 9 minutes of sales pitches

Can someone who knows the ins and outs of the advertising business tell me why advertising seconds are worth more on TV than online for the same content?

Well, for one thing, you're reaching mostly middle class American families which spend money on things rather than college students who are watching Hulu because it free, which is the maximum price they will pay for anything which is not an iPod.

This is of course not true. Most college students will have a relatively high paying job in a couple of years, so there is plenty of services that want to get their attention while it's still cheap to do so. Internet advertising is also much more direct, you can show different content for different groups of people. Much like Spotify does.

I do not have cable, satellite, or any other tv subscription. I get maybe two broadcast channels. I bring this up not to be "that guy" but to say that I do watch hulu. Especially because my viewing is such that it's after everyone is asleep, so it's just quieter to be at the pc with headphones anyway.

What I don't get is why they haven't figured out that less is more advertising. If I'm watching tv somewhere and a commercial comes on, I wander off. On hulu, it's only 30 seconds so I might as well sit there. Itwould be nice if it wasn't the same commercial repeated over and over, though.

Hulu seems great. Too bad it's not available in my country...

It is not as nice as Usenet or Bittorrent, both of which are available in your country.

While this is impressive, they could have a huge audience, they just don't seem to care about capturing it. Their efforts to expand to other countries is visibly nil; the majority of networks from the US already broadcast in Canada, yet we're not allowed to get their programs through legal channels on the internet (you might get lucky with a few shows like Grey's Anatomy being available through Canadian channels websites).

They care about expanding their audience. Justin Kilar talked about this in his interview with Charlie Rose. The problem arises from the legal complexities of differing cross-border ownership rights. Hulu has to get permission from the content owner and in many cases the content owner in America will be different than the owner in France (or whatever other country). In addition, they then have to work through the regulatory frameworks there. So it's not a matter of not caring, it's a matter of overcoming the legal hurdles.

From what I recall, Kilar's intention is to first try to expand into China. An admirable goal.

The problem arises from the legal complexities of differing cross-border ownership rights

That doesn't sound right - Hulu's owners employ the best lawyers and lobbyists on the planet. These institutions don't get stopped by "oh, the copyright laws abroad are so haaard" - they're the ones who created WIPO. And anyway, what is the difference between selling rights for a TV show or a Hulu show? It certainly seems a lot less complex than the taxes McDonalds pays on exporting "know-how" when it opens franchises in France.

I suspect foreign rights have already been sold under some long-term contracts and the studios are waiting for them to expire rather than renegotiate them in the middle.

Cross-border ownership rights are enormously complex; international copyright laws make tax laws look simple, and that doesn't even take into account the differences in copyright laws between countries.

You hear about the conflict over the Watchmen IP rights, or Superman, or Terminator? Those all took place entirely within one country. Now try figuring out the rights for hundreds of shows, with hundreds of different writers and producers (including dozens of each for a single show), with rights spread out over multiple holders across multiple continents and countries with different IP and contract laws.

Difference between a TV show and a Hulu show: first and foremost, Hulu is available everywhere; a TV signal (however transmitted) is not. Hulu is on-demand. TV is not. Hulu requires a conscious effort by the viewer to select what to watch. TV is entirely passive, except for turning it on (and even that requires significantly less effort than starting up a computer). Hulu streams are individualized to each viewer; TV broadcasts are indiscriminate. There are more differences, but those are the big ones.

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