Will Hulu Charge For Content?

NetworkingStudent

10.23.09

6Comments
by Jamie Lendino

Well, it was good while it lasted. New Hulu board member Chase Carey said that Hulu must start charging for at least some of its content as early as next year, according to Broadcasting & Cable.

At an event hosted by the publication, Carey said that the pay wall could be limited to special or advance programming, but that Hulu in general "needs to evolve to have a meaningful subscription model as part of its business."

This comes after reports several months ago that Hulu was planning several tiers of programming in order to draw in cable networks reluctant to participate in anything that could affect their subscriber base. But as the report points out, the announcement highlights how broadcasters are now looking for new revenue streams specifically from content distributors in order to supplement traditional sources of income from advertisers.

This post originally appeared on AppScout.

Will Hulu Charge For Content? - Reviews by PC Magazine

What are your thoughts on this, do you think it will last? I watched the local morning news and they were mentioning that newspapers are going to start charging for online content, and that they think Facebook will be next. Would you pay a fee to use Hulu,Facebook, Myspace,Linkedin, Twitter or Hulu?
Just wondering.........

tiersten

NetworkingStudent wrote: »

Would you pay a fee to use Hulu,Facebook, Myspace,Linkedin, Twitter or Hulu?

In my opinion:

Hulu may have a chance of getting a subscription fee out of people or everybody will go back to BitTorrent. I don't use Hulu since I'm in the UK but I probably wouldn't pay.
Facebook and MySpace don't really have much chance of doing that. People will jump ship and go to some other random social site that is free before they'll pay a subscription. I wouldn't pay.
Unsure about Linkedin. Probably not. Same again. Wouldn't pay.
Twitter has no chance as well. Too much opportunity for somebody else to swoop in and pick up all the people that refuse to pay. I don't use it and I wouldn't pay anyway even if I did.

dynamik

I think a lot of people have already gone back to torrents due to Hulu's terrible selection of a lot of shows. Most popular ones only have the five most recent or something like that. If i want to get into something, I want to start at the beginning and get up to speed on the plot, characters, etc.

I don't really watch TV. I don't have cable television, and I probably never will. I use Hulu for The Daily Show, and that's about my TV viewing for the week. Maybe I'll throw in a Colbert, Family Guy, Office, South Park, Always Sunny, etc. if I have some extra time, but that's rare.

Like Tiersten, I don't, or barely, use those other services, so there's no way I'd pay.

As far as Hulu goes, it depends on what they mean by subscription pricing. Are they going to offer HD-quality? Pay-per-view content? New movies? It might work depending on what they're offering. If they just start charging for what they're offering now, it's going to blow up in their face.

Hyper-Me

I pay for all of this programming with my monthly cable TV fee. I do not see the reason in me paying TWICE!!

This marks the demise of Hulu, unfortunately they wont see it in time.

I think hulu is seen by most as a supplement to the TV they pay for at home. So noone will want to pay for the same thing twice.

Plantwiz

They have some 'ok' stuff, but much of their 'old' programs are mere segments and not much to watch.

The movie selection is poor, and with the current volume of advertising already on that site, I don't see how a subscription is going to encourage more folks to use that site. Maybe their marketing monkies have already studied this, but why would someone pay for their offerings when Netfilx or Blockbuster already have current movies available?

Don't know...time will tell.

Bad move in my opinion.

Forsaken_GA

Hulu's only had a few things I've wanted to watch, mostly one shot specials that were aired only once, which weren't likely to pop up on a torrent site

And yeah, I won't be surprised if they charged for content. Streaming video uses alot of bandwidth, and while bandwidth is cheap and getting cheaper, you still can't afford to give it away.

I'll also be interested to see what happens to Facebook and Twitter. I'm thinking they can't survive on the free to the masses model for long, especially not when every major media entity is pimping out it's twitter and facebook, along with a whole bunch of major companies.

The Facebook and Twitter popularity amuses and annoys me. Back when I was a BBS nerd, I got made fun of for doing things like chatting online and leaving comments on peoples posts, and so on and so forth. Now, it's like America's new past time.

dynamik

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

Back when I was a BBS nerd, I got made fun of for doing things like chatting online and leaving comments on peoples posts, and so on and so forth. Now, it's like America's new past time.

So does that mean all us cool people can now go to the bars and not be annoyed by them?

the_Grinch

This is what I hate about technology. Something new and cool comes out, starts out free with people saying they'll never charge, and then suddenly charging begins. Why I would love to come up with the next multimillion dollar web idea, it peeves me that the creators begin to only see dollar signs. Charging for Facebook? As annoying as it tends to be I would leave in a second and not think about it. We have these things call cellphones and I am able to contact all of my friends whenever. It also has this nice feature where I can send out a message telling people about a party. Considering I pay $70 a month for the cell, I'd just as soon drop Facebook and use the cell. At least then I wouldn't have people I never talked to in high school call me up and say "hey I'd like to be your friend".

Also, with all the open source based stuff, you could easily start a Facebook/Myspace of your own and get your friends on it. These companies tend to forget that the current generation adapts quickly to new technology and they'll move on very quickly. What 13 year old can really pay for a service like Facebook/Myspace?