Hulu Will Need Exclusive Content at High Speed
The much-anticipated video joint venture from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and General Electric's NBC Universal, called Hulu, will finally show its face this week. Hulu launched its "private beta" today, and will slowly begin admitting users (including yours truly) this week.
Hulu, we're told, will be a mix of shared (YouTube-style) video, and premium content like shows from Fox and NBC. Hulu says it has also signed content deals with Sony and Metro Goldwyn-Mayer. Still, content-wise there are some glaring ommissions--it isn?t very likely that ABC, Disney or Viacom will sell their content at Hulu anytime soon. Like most Internet video sites, Hulu also has a lot of "long tail" (filler) content like CNET TV, G4 and Fuel TV.
But Hulu's coming-out today is an important day in Internet video for one reason. It marks the real beginning of big content owners like NBC banding together to sell video directly to the consumer. This is not to say that those content owners won't continue to sell through other online channels like iTunes. Rather, the content owners seem to have adopted a strategy of making their stuff available wherever the eyeballs are online (Hulu also begins streaming its video at AOL, Comcast, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo today). That's a huge change from the studios' very defensive posture of just 18 months ago.
News Corp. and NBC announced plans for Hulu last March, saying they intended to launch a site that would compete with YouTube. According to news reports, Hulu has backed off from those unrealistic hopes, and will focus on premium content like TV shows and movies. Not that that's a new idea either; Netflix, Amazon, Movielink have been doing this some time now.
So it really comes down to the exclusivity of the content at Hulu, and the speed and quality at which it's delivered. I will be taking Hulu for a test drive later this week (a spokeswoman told me the Hulu engineers need a couple more days to work out the bugs), and I will see for myself. For all I know, Hulu might offer premium movies that aren?t available (legitimately) anywhere else online, and might stream at better quality than any of us have ever seen. Stay tuned.
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Yeah... like I'm going to sit in front of a web browser based service and watch tv shows that include commercials???
Not a chance in %#@
DVR, here I come!
Houstonian, what if you paid half the amount of money you pay for DVR for premium Hullu membership which got you commercial free content? would you go for it?
just a thought
Houstonian, what if you paid half the amount of money you pay for DVR for premium Hullu membership which got you commercial free content? would you go for it?
just a thought