Hulu’s days of freedom are numbered
Hulu may shift to a partial subscription model within six months, meaning the all-free party is almost over.
The big-media online video site is working on a plan that would allow viewers to access the five most recent airings of hit TV series, but older episodes would require a subscription fee of something like $5, the Los Angeles Times said in breaking the paid Hulu story.
Not all series would require paid access, the Times said, speculating that 20 primetime shows would be involved.
Hulu is owned by News Corp., Disney and NBC Universal, an arrangement that has long fueled speculation that the online video site’s days were numbered, at least as a free entity.
Not a shocker. NewsCorp. bigshot Chase Carey signaled the bad news about Hulu last fall:
“I think a free model is a very difficult way to capture the value of our content,” Carey told a conference put on by Broadcasting & Cable. “I think what we need to do is deliver that content to consumers in a way where they will appreciate the value. Hulu concurs with that, it needs to evolve to have a meaningful subscription model as part of its business.”
Comcast’s takeover of NBC Uni probably figured into the subscription-model thinking, as the cabler seeks to wall off network programming on the Internet, a fear of consumer groups.
‘Motherlove’ clips rivals on Hulu
Hulu welcomed the new year by providing its blog readers with some of its online video stats from 2009. It’s a good read for Hulu trackers, with lots of wowie-zowie numbers to crunch.
We’re a bit burned out on numbers just now. Here are some programming highlights.
- The most popular shows on Hulu were “Saturday Night Live,” “Family Guy,” “The Office,” “The Simpsons” and “Naruto Shippuden.” (WTF is “Naruto Shippuden” you ask?)
- The clip with the most views was “Motherlove” from “SNL” — another howler from the “Dick in the Box” guys. (Guest stars MILF immortals Susan Sarandon and Patricia Clarkson)
- The No. 1 full episode was “Stew-Roids” from Fox’s “Family Guy.”
- The live video stream of President Obama’s Inauguration was voted in as the most embedded chunk of video.
Hulu turning to paid content, exec says
Hulu has paid content in its near future, News Corp. deputy chairman Chase Carey says.
The popular online video site that’s prized for its free streams of TV shows “needs to evolve to have a meaningful subscription model as part of its business,” Carey told a broadcasting conference Oct. 22.
News Corp. owns Hulu along with NBC Universal and Disney.
He was quoted on Hulu’s future by Broadcasting & Cable, which sponsored the conference.
Carey predicted some paid content would show up on Hulu in 2010, but admitted he’d only sat in on one of its board meetings. He said an outright firewall didn’t make sense, but charging for specialty video such as TV previews did.
“I think a free model is a very difficult way to capture the value of (News Corp.’s) content,” Carey said. “I think what we need to do is deliver that content to consumers in a way where they will appreciate the value.”
Hulu Labs cooks up Desktop player
Hulu has lifted the curtain on its beta-driven Labs section — and more importantly its new desktop application for home computers.
The Hulu Desktop, billed as “a lean-back viewing experience,” works with robust Macs and PCs (view system requirements). The app is downloaded from the Hulu site. Beyond that no browser is needed. You’ll need a current version of Flash for the thing to work.
The Desktop will feel familiar to fans of Boxee, the open-source media center app that Hulu unplugged from its video stream months ago. Unfortunately, the Hulu Desktop starts playing a video upon launch, a feature that’s drawing complaints from beta testers.
The Desktop takes commands from remotes for the Windows Media Center and Apple devices (as well as keyboards and your mouse). Linking the computer and your TV monitor would bring Hulu to your living room, of course.
Although you don’t need a Hulu account to use the Desktop, it looks like a good thing to link up for those who want access to their queue, histories and playback preferences. “Friends” aren’t welcome, so far.
The beta is very much for real. A lot of people are looking for bugs in the Hulu Desktop, and finding them. There seems to be a pattern of crashing after a few minutes of playing. Interesting comments in the thread.
Other products on the Hulu Labs page include a Video Panel Designer, which produces embeddable widgets. Webmasters can select a design from a fairly robust panel, with six color schemes. The width and size are customizable as well. There are various options such as full-length programs or clips.
Some shows and movies are only available as clips. Hulu says that “generally speaking” all of its content is available via the desktop client, but gives itself an out due to content providers’ wishes. There are ads on the videos (“limited commercial interruption”).
There are persistent reports that Hulu’s iPhone app is on the horizon, but this Flash-dependent client is of no apparent help. (It’s conceivable that the Hulu-iPhone app could be revealed at the Apple Developer Conference next week.)
The Labs page also has tryout versions of a recommendation system and a modest page for “time-based browsing” that allows users to search by date. The recommendation-feature preview, oddly, requires a login to view.
Macworld has a good overview and basic review of the Hulu Desktop.
You may recall that CBS Labs launched a similar page last year, but it hasn’t provided much beyond the preview of the CBS HD player.
System requirements for Mac include “Intel Pentium Core Duo 2.0GHz (or equivalent), Mac OS v10.4 (Tiger) or later, 2 Mbps Internet connection or greater and 2 gigs of RAM. For PC, it’s Intel Pentium Core Duo 1.8GHz (or equivalent) and Windows XP or our old friend Vista.)
Hulu steamed over Nielsen’s numbers
Hulu lost 1.5 million viewers in April, but streamed 25 million more videos than it did in March. Total video streams increased a whopping 490% year over year. Or … maybe not.
In email messages obtained by the New York Times, Hulu executives have been busy this week complaining to Nielsen about April’s reported loss of unique viewers, down from 7.4 million in March. “Uniques,” of course, is the stat that matters most to advertisers and the media these days.
ComScore, a competitor to Nielsen’s online ratings, reports Hulu’s total audience much higher, at 42 million for March — a spread of 34 million or so compared with Nielsen’s number for that month. (None of the ratings services have direct access to Hulu’s server reports, so one way or another, they’re all estimates.)
The Times weighs in on the mess:
The wildly divergent numbers demonstrate the nascency of the market for online-video measurement. It’s “still the wild, wild West,” said Rob Davis, a leader of the interactive video practice at OgilvyInteractive. … “Industrywide, we need to solve this.”
Meanwhile, Nielsen found some good news for Hulu, as it must:
Streaming-video consumers in the moneyed 35-to-49 demographic hiked their time spent on the site by 154% in the past six months, making it the top demo in viewing hours — an average of almost 7 hours. The 18-24 demo came in second in time spent, while the 25-34 group placed third.
Nielsen Online’s Jon Gibs does a spin drive-by: “Despite what many believe, it is not the young, tech-savvy, early-adopters who are attracted to long-form video. In fact, we see that it is the older crowd, viewers 35-plus, who gravitate toward long-form video, with sites like Hulu acting as a perfect example of this.”
Nielsen said Hulu’s total streams (online videos engaged by viewers) grew from 63.2 million in April 2008 to 373.3 million in April 2009 — some sort of land-speed record.
Hulu ranks second on both Nielsen and comScore’s key charts for online video, far behind Google’s YouTube.
Hulu’s uniques hit a high in February, the month in which the video service announced that its bad self had arrived with this snarky Super Bowl ad featuring Alec Baldwin.