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Hulu is a great example of an company working super hard to un-innovate innovation. They had the distribution, rights, timing, capital and credibility to at lea

Hulu is a great example of an company working super hard to un-innovate innovation. They had the distribution, rights, timing, capital and credibility to at least compete with, if not overtak netflix, but they couldn't Clayton Chrisitiansen it. Let's examine the Hulu usecase & customer storyboard. Who the fuck would want to pay, to watch selective programming...with commercials? What customer wants a worse, more tempermental version of their DVR box, that forcibly eliminates the features making a dvr/tivo box useful? Not only that but HBO? are they kidding. I am an HBO customer and I pirate HBO shows because they load faster and are in at least as good quality.I used to do this to Adobe. I commend them for lowering their product price and really getting competitve/offerig a ton of value. I pay $20 for creative cloud which is totally worth it for me vs. the time/aggrevation of pirating. I would've paid for hulu if I could watch shows as they aired, and anytime after, without commercials. Obviously, I can never pay for/trust them and never will, now. Netflix really needs a competitor... edit, to people saying HBO Now is good. HBO Go started in 06'. If it takes your company (one with the highest leverage in the industry) one decade to achieve mediocrity, you're already dead. Let's explore HBO further. HBO is a compan that primarily buys an resells content through a dying (but currently critical) distribution mechanism. Sure they develop their own content too, and it is really good tbh. It's just that when they end up like blockbuster, they will have to sell it through netflix. I mean, how the fuck didn't they see this coming...

taytus 10y ago
> Who they fuck would want to pay, to watch selective programming...with commercials? People like me.
- navbaker 10y ago
  Agreed, it's a good way to get network shows on demand without subscribing to a cable package.
rhino369 10y ago
>Who they fuck would want to pay, to watch selective programming...with commercials? Most homes do that. The people that hate commericals are a small but growing minority. And Hulu just recently released a no-commerical plan for like 13 bucks a month. >I am an HBO customer and I pirate HBO shows because they load faster and are in at least as good quality. I have really good experience with HBO NOW (and before it GO). It'll stream in 1080p the second the show airs on tv. They had some fuck ups a could years ago during some premiers, but since they moved to being hosted on mlb.tv, it's been great.
- vonklaus 10y ago
  > The people that hate commericals are a small but growing minority. I'm going to have to stop you there. With the exception of the 4 hours surrounding the superbowl, you go out into whereever you live and find someone who wants more commercials. Maybe you are correct, that people who hate them is a minority[0] as it is a strong sentiment, but they certainly aren't going to pay hulu? Why the fuck would they, they would just simply be purchasing a worse expereince than the DVR box they currently own? I mean maybe, if they demanded portability, and had an unliited data plan, but this is a strawman, as netflix exists. > I have really good experience with HBO NOW That's cool, and I respect that. One of my buddies worked on HBO Go when they started to think through the idea in 06. So I can't really trust a company that has arrived at mediocrity after a full decade of tackling a problem. [0] This is a thought experiment. You are super obviously wrong. The majority of people, of course, fucking hate commercials.
  - foobarian 10y ago
    It's not about the technology or the ads or so much the price. It's all about the catalog. Hulu, Netflix, HBO and Amazon are just fancy completely interchangeable video players; the only thing that matters is what you can watch on them. I pay for Hulu because the price is low enough, and the extra catalog is worth it. A few extra ads don't bother me enough to outweigh the good points. I pay for Netflix for the House of Cards and a few other things they have available for streaming here and there (like a bunch of children's shows), though their catalog has been getting terrible over time and I will probably cancel it. I pay for HBO for Game of Thrones. I'll probably cancel when I catch up. The bottom line is, the content creators have everyone by the balls and no matter how few ads the streaming sites show or how fancy their video player is there is very little they can do about it.
    - vonklaus 10y ago
      you know, this was a pretty good rebuttal. The interesting thing here is that this is the total opposite of the internet. Content creators (and content) is virtually worthless and interchangeable, while the "catalog" is virtually everything. The internet version of the catalog can be a portal like hn/google/reddit ect, but the actual content doesn't matter. Where as you correctly observed, the content is the only thing that matters for video.
narrowrail 10y ago
I think HBO is that competitor. Also, the funny thing about Hulu is: nobody wants to acquire them b/c they know big 3 networks will jack up the pricing for the content as soon as they sell it. Hulu is less competition to traditional TV because they still have commercials which fundamentally hobbles them. I imagine Hulu's owners hobble them in other ways (admittedly, just a hunch). Broadcast TV DVRs like HD Homerun and Channel Master DVR+ are currently under-utilized (even TIVO, the leader, is), but eventually may become well-known and used.
freehunter 10y ago
> If it takes your company (one with the highest leverage in the industry) one decade to achieve mediocrity, you're already dead. Just because they were bad 10 years ago and are good now does not mean it took 10 years to get good. It means sometime in the last 10 years, they got good. That may have been yesterday, it may have been last year, or the year before, or the year before, etc. I had no hair on my head when I was born. I have hair on my head now. Did it take me decades to grow hair, or did I grow it years ago and merely continue to have hair on my head to this day?
- vonklaus 10y ago
  This does make a lot of sense and I thought about it and is verifiably a series of true statements and rhetorical questions that drive home a point that is correct. However, it is totally unrelated to the development of a product that took 10 years to create. They brought in a team and made a halfway decent attempt at HBO Go before killing hte project(shelving it), they then revitalized it and ultimately launched a total piece of shit project. To be clear, software design is hard and sometimes you need to iterate. However, you are HBO so we can assume that you are either incompetent or just DGAF. Either way, GO floundered for the next halfish decade as an utter piece of shit totally eclipsed by for profit pirating sites doing a 10x better job delivering the content someone ripped from a box and then put online into native media players they wrote themselves that bury 2-3 layers if iframes into the page so they can still try and serve ads...this was a 10x better experience than HBO go. You had to find your cable password and go through an insane experience of finding passwords and cookie failures to get the privelege of a horrible search, viewing and quality experience. After a decade, HBO licensed technology from a completely independent party and now has halfway decent UX/UI. So I do not feel perfectly qualified to speculate on how your hair progressed because I don't know you. However, I would say that if you spend 1 decade avidly working on an application which would prove to be core to your business had it been successful, and then you ultimately just end up leasing one...well yeah you're fucking dead. I mean what does HBO do? It buys content and sells it. So they just lost the decade head start to build a distribution platform for that. > But they develop their own original programming! Everyone was thinking that. Correct, they mostly buy scripts and fund projects that have been pitched to them. Sure they do some stuff, but it would be a lot easier for netflix to buy the people (or the process) of developing the few shows HBO actually has a hand in creating (rather than simply buying and funding a pilot) than HBO has of recreating Netflix. So HBO is dead. Hulu is somewhat dead, I suspect due to the ties with legacy rent-collectors it will not "die" but just rebrand and be a slightly less horrible version of itself. tl;dr > Did it take me decades to grow hair, or did I grow it years ago and merely continue to have hair on my head to this day? Humans grow hair at a semi average rate of 0.5 inches a year. So if you were a typical human, unless you hair is over 60inches long then the hair is from new growth < 1 decade old.
oldmanjay 10y ago
Your attitude seems rather callow. I'm rather disappointed this is what HN is becoming.
tsycho 10y ago
My biggest problem with Hulu, even more annoying than the ads was that they didn't have all the episodes of the shows that they presumably have rights to. For a show like Modern Family for instance, they would have the latest episodes but not the previous seasons. And I saw the same for other shows as well. Ads were annoying, but they fixed that by charging more. But not having the content I cared made me cancel my premium subscription.

taytus 10y ago

> Who they fuck would want to pay, to watch selective programming...with commercials? People like me.

navbaker 10y ago
Agreed, it's a good way to get network shows on demand without subscribing to a cable package.

rhino369 10y ago

>Who they fuck would want to pay, to watch selective programming...with commercials? Most homes do that. The people that hate commericals are a small but growing minority. And Hulu just recently released a no-commerical plan for like 13 bucks a month. >I am an HBO customer and I pirate HBO shows because they load faster and are in at least as good quality. I have really good experience with HBO NOW (and before it GO). It'll stream in 1080p the second the show airs on tv. They had some fuck ups a could years ago during some premiers, but since they moved to being hosted on mlb.tv, it's been great.

vonklaus 10y ago
> The people that hate commericals are a small but growing minority. I'm going to have to stop you there. With the exception of the 4 hours surrounding the superbowl, you go out into whereever you live and find someone who wants more commercials. Maybe you are correct, that people who hate them is a minority[0] as it is a strong sentiment, but they certainly aren't going to pay hulu? Why the fuck would they, they would just simply be purchasing a worse expereince than the DVR box they currently own? I mean maybe, if they demanded portability, and had an unliited data plan, but this is a strawman, as netflix exists. > I have really good experience with HBO NOW That's cool, and I respect that. One of my buddies worked on HBO Go when they started to think through the idea in 06. So I can't really trust a company that has arrived at mediocrity after a full decade of tackling a problem. [0] This is a thought experiment. You are super obviously wrong. The majority of people, of course, fucking hate commercials.
- foobarian 10y ago
  It's not about the technology or the ads or so much the price. It's all about the catalog. Hulu, Netflix, HBO and Amazon are just fancy completely interchangeable video players; the only thing that matters is what you can watch on them. I pay for Hulu because the price is low enough, and the extra catalog is worth it. A few extra ads don't bother me enough to outweigh the good points. I pay for Netflix for the House of Cards and a few other things they have available for streaming here and there (like a bunch of children's shows), though their catalog has been getting terrible over time and I will probably cancel it. I pay for HBO for Game of Thrones. I'll probably cancel when I catch up. The bottom line is, the content creators have everyone by the balls and no matter how few ads the streaming sites show or how fancy their video player is there is very little they can do about it.
  - vonklaus 10y ago
    you know, this was a pretty good rebuttal. The interesting thing here is that this is the total opposite of the internet. Content creators (and content) is virtually worthless and interchangeable, while the "catalog" is virtually everything. The internet version of the catalog can be a portal like hn/google/reddit ect, but the actual content doesn't matter. Where as you correctly observed, the content is the only thing that matters for video.

narrowrail 10y ago

I think HBO is that competitor. Also, the funny thing about Hulu is: nobody wants to acquire them b/c they know big 3 networks will jack up the pricing for the content as soon as they sell it. Hulu is less competition to traditional TV because they still have commercials which fundamentally hobbles them. I imagine Hulu's owners hobble them in other ways (admittedly, just a hunch). Broadcast TV DVRs like HD Homerun and Channel Master DVR+ are currently under-utilized (even TIVO, the leader, is), but eventually may become well-known and used.

freehunter 10y ago

> If it takes your company (one with the highest leverage in the industry) one decade to achieve mediocrity, you're already dead. Just because they were bad 10 years ago and are good now does not mean it took 10 years to get good. It means sometime in the last 10 years, they got good. That may have been yesterday, it may have been last year, or the year before, or the year before, etc. I had no hair on my head when I was born. I have hair on my head now. Did it take me decades to grow hair, or did I grow it years ago and merely continue to have hair on my head to this day?

vonklaus 10y ago
This does make a lot of sense and I thought about it and is verifiably a series of true statements and rhetorical questions that drive home a point that is correct. However, it is totally unrelated to the development of a product that took 10 years to create. They brought in a team and made a halfway decent attempt at HBO Go before killing hte project(shelving it), they then revitalized it and ultimately launched a total piece of shit project. To be clear, software design is hard and sometimes you need to iterate. However, you are HBO so we can assume that you are either incompetent or just DGAF. Either way, GO floundered for the next halfish decade as an utter piece of shit totally eclipsed by for profit pirating sites doing a 10x better job delivering the content someone ripped from a box and then put online into native media players they wrote themselves that bury 2-3 layers if iframes into the page so they can still try and serve ads...this was a 10x better experience than HBO go. You had to find your cable password and go through an insane experience of finding passwords and cookie failures to get the privelege of a horrible search, viewing and quality experience. After a decade, HBO licensed technology from a completely independent party and now has halfway decent UX/UI. So I do not feel perfectly qualified to speculate on how your hair progressed because I don't know you. However, I would say that if you spend 1 decade avidly working on an application which would prove to be core to your business had it been successful, and then you ultimately just end up leasing one...well yeah you're fucking dead. I mean what does HBO do? It buys content and sells it. So they just lost the decade head start to build a distribution platform for that. > But they develop their own original programming! Everyone was thinking that. Correct, they mostly buy scripts and fund projects that have been pitched to them. Sure they do some stuff, but it would be a lot easier for netflix to buy the people (or the process) of developing the few shows HBO actually has a hand in creating (rather than simply buying and funding a pilot) than HBO has of recreating Netflix. So HBO is dead. Hulu is somewhat dead, I suspect due to the ties with legacy rent-collectors it will not "die" but just rebrand and be a slightly less horrible version of itself. tl;dr > Did it take me decades to grow hair, or did I grow it years ago and merely continue to have hair on my head to this day? Humans grow hair at a semi average rate of 0.5 inches a year. So if you were a typical human, unless you hair is over 60inches long then the hair is from new growth < 1 decade old.

oldmanjay 10y ago

Your attitude seems rather callow. I'm rather disappointed this is what HN is becoming.

tsycho 10y ago

My biggest problem with Hulu, even more annoying than the ads was that they didn't have all the episodes of the shows that they presumably have rights to. For a show like Modern Family for instance, they would have the latest episodes but not the previous seasons. And I saw the same for other shows as well. Ads were annoying, but they fixed that by charging more. But not having the content I cared made me cancel my premium subscription.