‘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.
Hulu power trio: ABC, Fox, NBC
The Walt Disney Company is taking a 28 percent share of Hulu, meaning that three of the Big Four television networks are about to become partners in the influential and popular streaming video site.
ABC hits such as “Dancing With the Stars,” “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives” are headed for Hulu, reinforcing the site’s ad-supported fare from NBC Universal (NBC) and News Corp. (Fox). Disney owns ABC. Some Disney Channel shows will be shared with Hulu, but not its cash cows “Hannah Montana” and the “High School Musical” spinoffs.
ABC shows currently stream for free on abc.com, some in HD. That site does not appear in the top 10 online video rankings. Hulu will be the first free site to carry ABC shows. The deal also brings the alphabet network’s content to Hulu’s network of partner web sites such as AOL.
As part of the deal, ABC is giving Hulu $25 million in network ad tradeouts, the New York Times reports.
NBC Universal and News Corp. re-upped for another two years on Hulu as part of the new structure.
CBS, the lone wolf at this point, issued a statement saying it preferred to distribute its own shows on the Net. Its shows appear on several outside video sites.
“CBS has long employed open, non-exclusive content partnerships (allowing us to) control our distribution, sales and profit,” the company said Thursday. “Controlling our own rights for that content — in all media — preserves its value in a multi-platform business system.”
Talks for Disney to go exclusively with revenue-hungry YouTube fell apart over owner Google’s refusal to offer an equity stake in its video site, the Times said. YouTube could only manage a watery deal with Disney that brings clips from ESPN and ABC to the user-generated-content giant. Analysts say YouTube will have to come up with equity or big-time payments to woo premium-content providers.
Another company no doubt watching the developments with interest is Apple, which sells ABC episodes on its iTunes Store. Apple chieftain Steve Jobs is a major Disney shareholder. (MacWorld ponders the Disney-Hulu impact on iTunes.)
Google put out a statement Thursday bragging that “the average YouTube viewer spends nearly 150 minutes a month watching videos on YouTube,” and that the Disney-Hulu deal was good for the online video industry.
Regardless, the new Hulu most likely will swamp YouTube’s aspirations of becoming a premium content player, at least for the next two years.
Hulu is third in market share behind YouTube and Fox, soon to be a distant second. Viewer time spent on Hulu has been increasing impressively.
Meanwhile, Sony’s Crackle video site trumpeted the addition of dozens of guy-friendly movies such as “Spiderman 2,” “Stripes,” “Groundhog Day” and a heaping pile of Japanese “Godzilla” movies.
“These are the movies that matter for guys 18-34,” said Eric Berger of Sony Pictures Television’s digital unit. Crackle also rolled out Cinemactive, an interactive trivia game. Sony Pictures also has embraced trivia games in its Blu-ray BD Live features.
Crackle’s movie page features a scroll of “Assassins and Ass-Kickers,” leaving no doubt that Sony Classics fare won’t be coming soon.
