

Hulu announces monthly subscription, support for iPhone/iPad, still ad supported - coderdude
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hulu_plus.php

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Towle_
This just plain isn't good enough. Nobody is going to look at Netflix
($9/month) and Hulu Plus and pick the latter. They're being way too stingy
with content. Give it all up, or go home.

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jpdbaugh
People pay close to a hundred dollars a month for similar and non a-la-carte
amounts of content that has about twice as many adds. Its called cable. Does
$10 a month really seem like that much money to you for something like this? I
don't watch TV so i am interested, however I just get frustrated with the
trend of people refusing pay for anything tech related such as apps or even
services like Pandora. Seriously, my non tech friends refuse to drop a couple
of dollars on iPhone apps that they will use all of the time yet they don't
hesitate to buy soft drinks when they eat out or add bacon to their burgers
for the same price...

Sorry, I don't mean to single you out. This is definitely more generally
directed.

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Towle_
When consumers make the decision to purchase Hulu Plus, they won't be thinking
about it in comparison to cable. They'll be comparing it to free Hulu, at it
will lose.

Sidenote: Cable comes on a TV; Hulu comes on a computer. Does this matter to
you personally? Likely not, you're a tech person and would have no issue
working around that to get your preferred service on your preferred platform.
But most people aren't you, and for them, that difference is called a barrier
to consumption. This is the same reason IE remains the majority internet
browser. It's the easiest thing in the world to just download another, better
browser. But some 60% of the US refuses to. Well, they don't _refuse_ to. They
just don't think about it.

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jpdbaugh
The market for people tech savvy enough to use hulu.com is probably a bit
larger than you give it credit for. I really don't see this as an addition to
cable either but rather a replacement and for $10 a month that is a hell of a
discount. Besides there is simply no way Hulu could make this service
advertisement free.. Hulu owns <i>none</i> of the content. They aren't just
scraping these shows off of network sites but they are instead making deals
with these companies who in turn impose the ads. Hulu is simply providing them
a platform to reach a tech savvy audience and they aren't going to change
their ad supported model.

But really, if people wanted ad free content it would cost ten times as much
as it does because they are making deals with other business to acquire their
content. At $10 a month though its cheaper to me than pirating because of
convenience. I guarantee I would save myself much more than the monthly price
by cutting the time it takes to find a good torrent to download the entire
backlog of a show I want to watch.

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dantheman
Hulu is owned by the networks.

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ericd
To be specific, NBC, ABC, and Fox own Hulu:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulu> (see right sidebar for ownership
breakdown)

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kmfrk
As much as you spoilt yanks disapprove, we Europeans would crawl on broken
glass and do terribly embarrassing things to get something like this. To add
insult to injury, basically no channels transmit HD shows in my country.

On another note, all the people who interject "I don't watch/have a TV" in
_every bloody conversation_ would probably love this, regardless of how large
a demographic they comprise. Are we assuming that Hulu will have to satisfy
_all_ types of consumers for it to be a good idea, or are you just chiming in
with your own, perfectly reasonable, arguments? I just don't know how useful
the "I won't get it, therefore it is a bad idea" is and how it reflects Hulu's
strategy.

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siculars
Hmm. So for $10/mo. you get... ad interrupted shows, buuut you can see entire
seasons of ad interrupted shows on all your iDevices.

How does this function?

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ashishbharthi
I tried few free shows on iPhone 4 over 3G. Video quality is spectacular. I am
not going to buy it because I am already paying for $120/month for cable and
dvr.

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dailyrorschach
And this is why I am considering it, in addition to netflix, since I cancelled
cable and dvr at that rate.

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ashishbharthi
I would agree with you on that but I need cable for occasional news and live
broadcasts/award shows/talk shows type things. Otherwise I can totally live
off of Netflix and Hulu.

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tomjen3
Too little, far too late.

I really don't know if the media companies know just how much they have
already lost - at this point most of the under 30 crowd downloads without even
the tiniest feeling that perhaps, just maybe, they shouldn't or the companies
deserve payment for what they have created.

At this point their only hope is to make it more convenient than piracy, which
is possible to do now but won't in a couple of years and then slowly ween
people away from free content.

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thibaut_barrere
For some reason, this reminds me of Philip K Dick's book "The Simulacra".

If I recall well, the guy is trying to escape advertising bots of some kind.

There's a trend toward "paid + ads". It may soon become the norm to pay
premium plans only to get rid of ads, in the OS, on your phone
(<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/27/windows_phone_7_ads/>).

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modeless
Meh. There's no reason the using the iPhone/iPad app should cost money. The
subscription should get you back seasons, not just back episodes from the
current season. The media companies are afraid of losing their DVD revenues,
but if they don't loosen up they may just end up driving more people to
illegal sites.

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samratjp
Direct link to Hulu's Blog Post: <http://www.hulu.com/plus>

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dinedal
I think this is Hulu's attempt to make even more money on the iDevices.

I wonder if the iDevice had Flash, would they be able to do this?

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whughes
The answer is _yes_. Hulu has regularly blocked Flash-enabled devices through
various (often circumventable, but still) means. It's just that you never hear
about them.

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dinedal
I wasn't aware Hulu was that defensive of it's content as to block it based on
what device is running the browser. That's crazy.

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larsberg
Hulu reps have been quoted before saying it's because of licensing
restrictions related to the content on other devices than PCs.

Having played around with it (I hacked together a gnash+ffmpeg port that's
just sufficient to run Hulu on my own iPhone), they just have some logic in
their flash scripts to prevent playing on unlicensed platforms. And in order
to prevent direct linking to the FLVs, they use some obfuscating logic --
namely, they give you a string + a key and have you perform an AES-style
operation using the two locally to get a time-expiring key to the file you
want to play. They change the obfuscating pattern just often enough to make it
annoying if you were, say, trying to keep up a Boxee script or update an
AppStore application.

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commieneko
Subscription? Ads? heh...

