Hulu to Charge Users in 2010 | Hacker News Reader

Hulu to Charge Users in 2010

tvweek.com

12 pointsw1ntermute28 comments

It seems like the big players that give away their content for free (Hulu, youtube, most newspapers, etc) seem to be struggling financially whereas the ones charging for it (netflix, itunes music store, WSJ, economist) seem to be doing well. Perhaps the 'free' business model isn't quite what it's cracked up to be.

The companies who are charging have spent years developing solid business models that will give people reason to open their wallets.

I think many of the free companies had decent business models when ad revenue was plentiful. Now that the market's crashed, however, they're being forced to go back to the drawing board.

Different types of content with different types and size of audience will demand different types of revenue models. So a free model will not work for everything, an ad model will not work for everything, and a pay model will not work with everything (at least on the internet).

I'd say freemium is the most promising approach so far where those who are willing to pay more pay a lot more to cover the costs incurred by those who aren't willing to pay anything at all, so that those aren't willing to pay anything at all make the service/product more valuable to those who pay more. Whew... Anyways airlines operate sort of like this where First class pays a shitload more than coach. The graduated tax system is another example.

Wait. Youtube's struggling? I thought that report was founded on an oversimplified bandwidth-cost model.

According to RampRate, YouTube is losing $174 Million. Not as bad as losing $470 Million as originally reported by Credit Suisse but still a loss.

Ref: http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20090617/credit-suisse-fa...

You'll pay for it and watch their ads. It's happened twice before, once with cable TV and again with satellite radio.

Piracy was never so easy with TV and radio. Once my grandmother knows how to torrent her shows, they've lost.

Grandma better hurry, with big content writing the next wave of international copyright policy, mainstream piracy of TV and movies will be dead in a couple of years.

That, or, she better read up on Tor. :)

We have yet to see the outcome of the current copyright conflict. I think there's a point we're nearing soon where technology makes tracking impossible.

Only if technology also makes paying unnecessary. Open WiFi didn't happen because it makes the owner of the access point appear liable; IMO the only way we're going to get around this sort of effect is to build One Big Mesh, which doesn't look likely to happen soon.

It's too expensive to hunt down everybody involved. The world isn't able to go after millions of people at once. The more people use it, the harder it is to track.

I'm guessing it was part of the plan all along. Lets create a cable channel(s) and deliver it over the internet. We won't have to deal with all of the franchise carriers or split the profit! How to get people interested in the first place? Oh! Offer it free! Once we get some viewers and some interest, bam! subscription fee. Its cable, but with teh intertubes. Its diabolically brilliant if you think about it from the right perspective.

I'm predicting a "return of napster" sized crater where hulu.com used to be.

I've actually been hoping they would start charging for a long time.

I hate how they only have a few episodes of my favorite shows--obviously because they only do ads.

I'd gladly pay a reasonable annual fee to be able to watch all the episodes I want.

What on earth makes you think that there's a correlation between paying and watching all the episodes you want? I'd be more inclined to believe that they'd throw the existing Hulu behind a paywall and call it a day.

Netflix does a similar thing on Watch Instantly with their relationship with Starz Play - content only exists for a certain amount of time, then drops off.

Isn't the lack of significant revenue one of the reasons why networks hold back from posting more than a handful of episodes from popular shows?

My thought was that if the networks saw there was money to be made, it would encourage them to make more content available.

... and I'll pay, if they give me DRM-free 1080p H.264 downloads, the same way the music industry lets me have DRM-free 320kbps MP3s now.

And of course they're sensible enough to go for that market... right?

NewsCorp leveraged their equity in MySpace to force them to increase revenue at the cost of quality. Now it seems they are following the same pattern with Hulu.

However, I think with Hulu they stand a better chance in the face of competition for two reasons. First the revenue model for streaming content is well established. Secondly, copyright law provides too high a barrier of entry into the space for competitors.

Does anyone know if there is anything technically that is stopping someone from downloading the hulu broadcasts?

I was talking about this last night I think it is almost time for a DVR for my computer, so I don't have to watch the hulu commercials.

Hulu's got about the most hard core anti-ripping technology on the web going right now. They're about the only ones out there who have stayed ahead of the curve preventing that sort of thing. The only thing I know of that works right now is a realtime screen scraping thing, which isn't very practical.

Really? It's just Flash video, isn't it? What's to stop me from yanking the data out of memory?

Its actually adobe rtmpe streams. These are encrypted so you have to find a way to pull the keys from the plugin's memory as well. No one's got it just yet.

If it's flash video you can just capture the FLV stream like this with a http sinffer: http://superuser.com/questions/28241/where-to-find-a-youtube...

I use TED (torrent episode downloader). It has a large list of tv shows and when they come on, and starts searching torrent sites for the shows you select right after they air.

Fwiw, I used to pay 15/month each for the Daily Show and Colbert on iTunes. But they posted the shows the next day, usually very late in the day, so by the time you watched it was 48 hour stale. With TED, they're automatically downloaded often before they actually air on the west coast.

For a while you could use rtmpdump and a perl script but then they started encrypting part of the data and it doesn't work anymore. I think some of that came out of their fight with boxee (who voluntarily removed it, but Hulu took other steps as well).

That's fine with me, if it's a small fee and they drop the ads. It would seem like a bit of a waste to pay for cable and Hulu, though.

Thank god for Justin.tv & BitTorrent!

I don't care much for them until they stop fighting with boxee.

It will be worth it if they make it as good as cable tv with out ads. Unfortunately they will properly just double the amount of ads.

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