News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch told investors on Tuesday that the company is "looking into" the possibility of adding subscription products and pay-per-view offerings to the popular online TV show site Hulu.
No final decision has been made, Murdoch said, speaking at an investor conference that was Webcast.
via MarketWatch.
I'm sure viewers would be fine if pay-per-view content was added to Hulu.com, but in the same investor conference Murdoch revealed that the WSJ would start charging for weekly access to the newspaper via their iPhone and Blackberry applications, which is currently free, so who knows exactly what Rupert is thinking about for Hulu.
What happened to the Hulu app for the iPhone?
If hulu switches to all pay per view, then I will go back to illegally downloading tv shows.
Yeah, impossible to know what he’s thinking right now, but if this means Fox shows that are current free stop being free, people will not be pleased. If, on the other hand, it means adding Fox movies that cost money or maybe cable shows that aren’t on Hulu right now (though I think all FX shows are on Hulu), that would be cool.
Whereas Murdoch’s bidding will be done with regard to the WSJ, that is not so for Hulu. Whatever Murdoch envisions for Hulu he will have to get NBCU and Disney to agree with him. Given the uneven distribution of cable channels/carriage fees between those 3, reaching agreement for a pay service could be tricky.
I only really use Hulu to catch an episode of a show I missed if say, my power goes out, or my DVR fails to record it. But if Hulu started charging, I would likely turn to Amazon’s VOD for those episodes. At least I would own it.
It’s funny watching Ruppie twist in the wind at the moment, he really is a dinosaur that’s lost touch with the digital world.
1. Paying for news in a market with tens of thousands of free news sources is a non starter. When his argument is “people will pay for quality content” I agree, that’s why they won’t pay for News Corporations recycled press releases, right wing rantings, Reuters, P.A. et al News Service re-wordings and opinion pieces masquerading as real reporting.
2. The Genie is out of the bottle and the problem will get worse before it gets better. A current top of the range Intel I7 processor can compress HD digital transmission to mpeg4 avi format faster then it can be broadcast and the processor has 8 cores so can easily handle doing 6 compress jobs simultaneously. As compression technologies improve you’ll see mpeg5esque transcoding performing even better compression by 2012. With the increase of bandwidth in the home, by 2014 you’ll probably be able to download 1gb of data in less then 30 minutes, that means HD with AC3 in less time then it took to broadcast it.
The barons who continually try to hang onto the historical TV distribution model really need to come around to the technical realitites of today.
The dilemma would be what the price point will be. iTunes and Amazon are both $1.99 (right?) so I feel like Hulu would have to be around $0.49 to be able to get anyone to pay. Like Stephan says, you wouldn’t own the episode. (Unless of course you could repeatedly watch any episode you paid for, which would still be restricted to however long the episode is available on Hulu.) But then the question becomes how much do they currently make per viewer with the commercials, and what Fox really wants to make per viewer.
Julia, they might just charge $.99 to stream it the same time it’s released and still have ads in it. And make you wait 8 days to watch the stream for free. There are all kinds of options, but all the networks have to buy into it and it won’t work if ABC makes LOST for free immediately on ABC.com, but it is available for a fee on Hulu. There are more things to resolve than merely price points.
So you don’t think there’s anyway that the other two nets would allow Fox to be the only one to charge? I can actually see it as an advantage to NBC and ABC, since people who are just browsing Hulu would be more likely to watch their shows.
There are lots of options for what they could do, but theoretically they should all be aimed at making sense for the entity that is Hulu. All of the “TV Everywhere thinking plays in too.
If I’m Fox, I want to charge for Sons of Anarchy and not make it freely available online at all(not even 8 days delayed) to anyone who isn’t subscribed to FX, but am fine with FX subscribers getting it for no extra cost.
But that’s if *I* am Fox. The people who are actually working at Fox might feel differently…
Yes, SD versions are $1.99, and HD versions are $2.99 per episode on Amazon. I think you can buy season passes at a discount though. I’ve never done it, so I don’t know what the discount is.
There are so many venues where you can get free things… to attempt to make people pay is not smart.
Example A — Big Bang Theory has no free full episodes on hulu/cbs etc etc
However i know of 3 places where you can watch every episode anytime.
They should enjoy the ad revenue while they have it.
There are lots of options for what they could do, but theoretically they should all be aimed at making sense for the entity that is Hulu.
Emphasis on theoretically, right? I mean, maybe I’m projecting here, but it seems like ABC, NBC and Fox just see Hulu as a way to help their own shows and they don’t really care about Hulu as a separate entity.
I think Pay-Per-View is stupid since it would just encourage people to simply buy the episode from iTunes and Amazon and other similar vendors, if not just download torrents. Sure, they could make it cheap, like 50 cents or so, but even then I can’t imagine such a small rate being so profitable.
I think a subscription model would be better, like $10 a month for unlimited viewing, but even then there’d be issues on how the three companies would split it, whether evenly or based on content or what.
Theoretically, I think charging for Hulu wouldn’t dramatically hurt the audience and could be more profitable than their advertising model, but the fact that there’s three companies involved is what really complicates the situation.
Those greedy %$&$&**^(^&((
All the good stuff we’ll have to pay for. The free stuff will just be the bottom of the barrel.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep all the content free (except for maybe some EXCLUSIVE pay-per-view content that you would see nowhere else EXCEPT on Hulu), build audience in the millions, and then make your profits from advertising? No, they need to turn Hulu into another revenue generator that only the elite can afford.
If the networks has any sense what’s good for them they’ll shut down Hulu and pull episodes off other sites including their own.
The penies They make from streaming is nothing compared to what they can do from ad revenue once people who doesn’t have DVRs have no choise but to sit infront of the TV.
And no most of them will not download illegaly or watch it in foreign streaming sites. They could’ve done that before September 2007 and they didn’t.
I could see a subscription thing working, though not at the expense of free access. For example, give the user an option between a “1 hour watch/1 hour wait” free viewing, and unlimited subscription viewing. For those who watch a lot of their shows online they would pay for the convenience (as long as the fee were reasonable). For those who watch very rarely (to catch a missed episode) the limit would not affect them much and so they could continue to catch missed episodes for free. This also allows people to try out a new show without having to pay ahead of time. People will be more likely to pass up on something they don’t know much about if there is an upfront cost.
As for what a resonable fee would be; if you had to pay to watch each episode, AND there was advertising, people would balk at paying more than a token amount. After all, tv watchers and dvr users watch for free (broadcast channels). In that case people would probably just buy the iTunes, or wait for the dvd, or illegally download; all advertisement free.
Anyway, that’s just my view of it.
I think a subscription service would work better than pay-per-view. If they wanted to do this, they could have the shows available to subscribers as soon as it aired on the west coast but still have it available for free after 8 days. A lot of the shows already have the week delay, so free users wouldn’t be loosing much, but those who want the shows earlier can get it.
just put more commercials we wont mind
just as long as its still free
Please no, I love the Fox News Channel when i can watch it (i have broadcast only thanks recession) but to get the AUDIO PODCASTS you have to pay 5 bucks a month. Thats insane. Throw a few more ads and keep it free.