Hulu To Actually Add Premium Pay Content While Keeping Current Content Free | Hacker News Reader

Hulu To Actually Add Premium Pay Content While Keeping Current Content Free

mediamemo.allthingsd.com

18 pointsw1ntermute11 comments

The "premium" content is really the content they had at the beginning, but lost over time as the rights holders cracked down; e.g. movies you'd actually want to watch, and more than 5 back episodes of currently-running shows.

What we have here really is a failure of the advertising model Hulu uses. They just can't make enough money per viewer to displace traditional broadcasting or DVD sales. IMHO either Hulu or the advertisers are doing something stupid, because there really should be a gold mine there. The targeting and scheduling flexibility that's possible on a site like Hulu should make it more valuable per viewer than TV.

TV and newspapers used to have an advertising monopoly. Possibly the competitive pressure outweighs the better targetting?

Online advertising doesn't compete against traditional broadcast advertising on a level playing field. You can directly measure a lot of the effectiveness of an online ad. That's much harder to do with traditional ads, so everyone uses statistical models for pricing. Except those models are probably mostly garbage.

Likely online advertising meets or exceeds the actual performance of traditional ads, but people have yet to admit out loud that the emperor has no clothes. That's only a matter of time though, and the result won't be any different than the current reality: to maintain the production levels people are used to, business models are going to have to change, whether it's subscriptions like Hulu is going for, or something else entirely.

I don't think it's a failure as much as it's a case of the market not being ready yet.

Hulu, last I checked, reports about 370 million streams a month which lines up with Compete.com's numbers which puts them at about 7 million viewers per month (around 12 streams average per user per week).

That number puts their entire audience lower than most single TV shows (CBS manages to get at least 8 million viewers on Friday night at 10pm which is the worst time slot in existance for broadcast TV). Couple that with the fact that Online TV shows only being able to support a few commercials per show and you have a very tough market.

But as Online video reaches critical mass and the audience grows I think you'll start to see a more sustainable ad based revenue model

This is great news.

It's pretty impressive that Hulu was put together not just through a big company, but through a collaboration of four giant media conglomerates. Not the outcome that we might have expected. Kudos to the team that navigated that deal . . .

Here's hoping that the book publishers take the lessons to heart for their transition and record labels realize what they've missed and get back on track.

Now that makes more sense then the nonsensical plan everybody was assuming they would go with.

The sad part is, they've been saying that since the beginning. Just, no one's bothering to read and instead they go straight to 'Hulu's dead' and all that hyperbole.

this is textbook "freemium" model.

Doesn't matter - I can't see their content anyways, I'm Canadian...

Hulu blocks geographic regions _and_ nationality, too!

pokesfun :)

Adding premium content means more ads for it and upselling which will make visiting the site less and less pleasant for "free" content.

But they will never have competitors as they are the only one that owns the rights to display virtually all of their content online, so they pretty much can do whatever they want, it's a monopoly.

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