- Content owners allow services like Hulu to exist in order to reduce piracy and to help prove the market for online content.
- Content owners want multiple buyers for their content to maximize their pricing - but only if they start charging a lot more money.
- Content Owners and Cable TV companies want services like Hulu to die because they are setting prices much lower than traditional cable packages.
Right now, the forces keeping services like Hulu alive are roughly balanced with the forces that want it dead. And Hulu is important - much more important than Netflix in this battle. Netflix shows stale movies. While they get a lot of press, the truth is that what most people watch on TV are TV shows and sports and that's what they're pay $70-100 per month for cable to see.
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| Photo from Thms.NL |
Hulu focuses on TV and that's what makes them much more a focus in the content battle than Netflix at the moment - though Netflix is entering that fray as well as they start bidding for TV reruns more aggressively.
Lately, though, the signs in the press show that the forces that keep Hulu somewhere between life and death are getting out of balance. And the forces that want to kill are getting stronger.
- Hulu's scale and viewership is starting to attract attention and cable companies are struggling to keep subscribers. Cord cutting hasn't taken off, but it also won't die. Every week there's a new testimonial on how people seem to like it just fine.
- More recently, there's been the news that many of Hulu's content contracts are up for renewal and the company is under pressure to become something more like a virtual cableTV operator - and charge much higher prices.
Killing Hulu completely, right now, is likely to attract too much interest from the justice department, so soon after it approved Comast's acquisition of NBC. But if the forces working against Hulu and for higher cable bills are ascendent, then expect too Hulu die a slow, miserable death of a thousand small cuts.
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