

Hulu To Actually Add Premium Pay Content While Keeping Current Content Free - w1ntermute
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20091023/how-much-will-you-have-to-pay-for-hulu-nothing-how-much-will-you-pay-for-hulu-plus-good-question/

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modeless
The "premium" content is really the content they had at the beginning, but
lost over time as the rights holders cracked down; e.g. movies you'd actually
want to watch, and more than 5 back episodes of currently-running shows.

What we have here really is a failure of the advertising model Hulu uses. They
just can't make enough money per viewer to displace traditional broadcasting
or DVD sales. IMHO either Hulu or the advertisers are doing something stupid,
because there really should be a gold mine there. The targeting and scheduling
flexibility that's possible on a site like Hulu should make it more valuable
per viewer than TV.

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whopa
Online advertising doesn't compete against traditional broadcast advertising
on a level playing field. You can directly measure a lot of the effectiveness
of an online ad. That's much harder to do with traditional ads, so everyone
uses statistical models for pricing. Except those models are probably mostly
garbage.

Likely online advertising meets or exceeds the actual performance of
traditional ads, but people have yet to admit out loud that the emperor has no
clothes. That's only a matter of time though, and the result won't be any
different than the current reality: to maintain the production levels people
are used to, business models are going to have to change, whether it's
subscriptions like Hulu is going for, or something else entirely.

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GavinB
This is great news.

It's pretty impressive that Hulu was put together not just through a big
company, but through a collaboration of four giant media conglomerates. Not
the outcome that we might have expected. Kudos to the team that navigated that
deal . . .

Here's hoping that the book publishers take the lessons to heart for their
transition and record labels realize what they've missed and get back on
track.

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elblanco
Now that makes more sense then the nonsensical plan everybody was assuming
they would go with.

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memetichazard
The sad part is, they've been saying that since the beginning. Just, no one's
bothering to read and instead they go straight to 'Hulu's dead' and all that
hyperbole.

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xexers
this is textbook "freemium" model.

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joeycfan
Doesn't matter - I can't see their content anyways, I'm Canadian...

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swixmix
Hulu blocks geographic regions _and_ nationality, too!

 _pokesfun_ :)

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_ck_
Adding premium content means more ads for it and upselling which will make
visiting the site less and less pleasant for "free" content.

But they will never have competitors as they are the only one that owns the
rights to display virtually all of their content online, so they pretty much
can do whatever they want, it's a monopoly.

