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Blog posts tagged with 'Hulu'
Tuesday, February 07
The online streaming game — currently dominated by Netflix and Hulu — is about to get more crowded, as Verizon and DVD kiosk rental service Redbox have announced a new partnership. As Sinead Carew and Yinka Adegoke of Reuters report:
The venture will combine the Redbox DVD rental kiosk business with an Internet video offering from Verizon, including mobile offerings, in the second half of the year.
Friday, April 15
At the LA Times, Dawn C. Chmielewski and Meg James offer an interesting look at online video site Hulu’s success — and how its explosive popularity is causing heartburn for the TV networks that created it:
Once hailed as the networks’ solution in taming the Internet, Hulu’s stunning success is now undermining the very system it was designed to protect, forcing the site’s owners to reconsider what Hulu should be.
“Technology is changing so fast, and, as a direct result, so is consumers’ behavior,” said Jordan Levin, chief executive of the TV and Internet studio Generate. “One of Hulu’s problems was that it accelerated changes in behavior faster than the companies were prepared for.”
Wednesday, February 16
PricewaterhouseCoopers has released a new study on online privacy. At GigaOm, Janko Roettgers digs into the findings:
Respondents signaled some willingness to pay, but not much — and the vast majority said that they’re going to continue to hunt for free loot. However, people don’t seem to mind ads, so the Hulu model might actually working to curb piracy.
Streaming clearly dominates video piracy, with 82 percent of respondents saying that they get their TV fare as streams, and 69 percent streaming pirated movies online. 62 percent admitted to downloading TV show episodes, and 52 percent do so with movie titles.
The full study is available at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Monday, October 25
Recently, Cablevision and the FOX Network have been duking it out over “carriage rates,” and as a result of the fight, FOX has blocked all of its content from the cable provider’s customers.
These types of disputes aren’t rare, but in this case, FOX took an extra step and blocked all of its content from Cablevision customers trying to access it on the online video site Hulu (of which FOX is part owner). The move has garnered the attention of the FCC, and as Farhad Manjoo of Slate writes, it also highlights just how murky the entire net neutrality debate really is:
For a host of legal and economic reasons, we haven’t traditionally regulated content companies—a category that includes not just studios like Fox but also record labels, newspapers, and Web sites like Google and Facebook (not to mention Slate) . In general, content creators are allowed to distribute their products however they want—it would be absurd for the government to force the Washington Post to sell its paper on newsstands in Boston, say, or for the Feds to require the Beatles to offer their music on the iTunes store.
Online media outlets already impose a host of restrictions on who can get what, when. If you live outside of the United States, you can’t get Hulu. If you live in the United States, you can’t get Spotify. The novel thing about Fox’s Hulu block was that it was aimed at a particular ISP, not a whole country. But what’s wrong with that? Fox’s entire corporate mission, after all, consists of selling content to people who pay for it. Shouldn’t it have the right to block its shows from a set of customers it believes aren’t paying enough?
All of this suggests a blind spot in the neutrality debate. Activists worry that if broadband companies begin charging content companies for access to Internet lines, only big, established sites with deep pockets will be able to afford a place online. But the Fox incident suggests that we should probably be just as concerned about the opposite problem—that content companies might start charging broadband companies to access their content. This would turn the Internet into something like cable TV—your ISP would carry, say, Hulu so long as it paid the site’s owners a carriage fee. The cost of those fees, of course, would be passed along to every one of the ISP’s subscribers, whether they watch Hulu or not.
Friday, June 25
New numbers released put together by comScore show that online video continues grow by leaps and bounds, with 34 billion videos watched by people in the U.S. in the month of May alone. Leading the charge was YouTube, with Hulu coming in second at 1.2 billion streams.
Speaking of Hulu, the popular site owned by major networks like NBC and FOX, will reportedly begin testing a subscription service beginning this month. From the Wall Street Journal:
The service would initially be a “preview,” available only to invited users, said the people briefed on the matter. Those users would pay a monthly fee of around $10 for access to additional content on top of Hulu’s free offerings, and also get the ability to watch Hulu on Apple Inc.‘s iPad and possibly other devices, said one of these people.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg is reporting that one of those possible “other devices” could be Sony’s Playstation 3 console. Microsoft’s rival XBox 360 console has also been rumored.
Thursday, May 27
As the proposed Comcast-NBC merger continues to be mulled over by the FCC, one Senator wants the cable giant to give up one of its major investments. From Yahoo News:
Senator Herb Kohl, who chairs the Senate subcommittee on antitrust, competition policy and consumer rights, told regulators he wants 11 conditions attached to the transaction.
One of those conditions is a requirement that Comcast divest NBC’s interest in Hulu within a year of the closing of the deal, Kohl said in a letter to the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission.
“Should your agencies decide to approve this transaction, you should adopt conditions necessary to avoid the risk of injury to competition and consumers,” he wrote in the letter dated May 26.
Thursday, April 22
For the past two years, online video site Hulu has been giving content away to viewers. But as the Los Angeles Times reports, that business model is about to change:
Hulu, the popular online site for watching television shows, plans to begin testing a subscription service as soon as May 24, according to people with knowledge of the plans.
Under the proposal, Hulu would continue to provide for free the five most recent episodes of shows like Fox’s “Glee,” “ABC’s “Lost” or NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” But viewers who want to see additional episodes would pay $9.95 a month to access a more comprehensive selection, called Hulu Plus, these people said.
Hulu currently ranks only behind YouTube when it comes to online viewers. It will be interesting to see what this new plan does to their traffic.
Wednesday, February 03
Today’s Wall Street Journal profiles start-up Move Networks Inc., which is hoping to create a full-on television network online:
If the company is able to launch the service it is now pitching to broadcasters—tentatively dubbed Move TV—viewers could watch programs in one of three ways: via a computer’s Web browser; on a television that is either equipped with a built-in Internet jack or connected to a set-top converter box; or on a wireless, Internet-connected device like an iPhone or iPad.
Because Move isn’t laying cable or launching satellites, the company’s executives argue they can charge consumers far less than traditional pay-television operators for a comparable suite of channels. Move hopes to undercut those operators further by offering a pared-down lineup—perhaps as few as 80 to 100 channels.
So far Move Networks has received funding from the likes of Microsoft, Comcast, and Disney. But whether consumers — not to mention America’s broadband infrastructure — are ready for a fully online TV network remains to be seen.
Elsewhere in the online TV landscape, USA Today reports that popular video site Hulu is flirting with the idea of charging for some content.
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