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Between Netflix and Hulu, I get a lot (not all) of shows (and movies) streamed to me for ~$11 month (my netflix) + ads (hulu). For $30 dollars a month, I would

Between Netflix and Hulu, I get a lot (not all) of shows (and movies) streamed to me for ~$11 month (my netflix) + ads (hulu). For $30 dollars a month, I would expect access to a much higher percentage of old shows, plus streaming of the new ones. Now, of course that doesn't mean the networks like it, or will agree to a contract like that. They should though, because they'll never get more than that out of me per month, and I see cable becoming increasingly irrelevant as streaming becomes more popular.

timr 16y ago
"Between Netflix and Hulu, I get a lot (not all) of shows (and movies) streamed to me for ~$11 month (my netflix) + ads (hulu)." You left off "...for now." Hulu is on record that they'll be moving to a PPV model for certain shows. The days of completely ad-supported Hulu are numbered.
mikeryan 16y ago
If you're not a power watcher you can make this work at that price point. But as pointed out elsewhere Hulu is a trial service and still working out their model. It has quite a few shows but its totality is actually quite small. They're controlled by the networks and if you follow their TOS you should only be able to watch their shows on a pc NOT on a TV. Netflix's service is awesome but again quite limited. Sports is completely ignored in your model. ESPN makes $2-3 per cable subscriber whether you watch them or not. This equals about 1 billion (no joke) a year in revenues for them. So just to get ESPN it would cost about ~%10 of your viewing budget. Now its not just ESPN every network thats older than 5 years old gets a cut of your cable bill. Let alone the fact that you can't stream most local sports over the internet at this point. I see both sides of the argument and I thought as you do that cable is becoming more irrelevant. Heck on Monday the UFC's Roku channel launched - which allows users to bypass cable for PPV events. My company built that. But the truth is that the TV Networks are pretty inextricably tied at this point to the cable operators. Internet delivery of on-demand content at a reasonable rate doesn't yet make sense.

timr 16y ago

"Between Netflix and Hulu, I get a lot (not all) of shows (and movies) streamed to me for ~$11 month (my netflix) + ads (hulu)." You left off "...for now." Hulu is on record that they'll be moving to a PPV model for certain shows. The days of completely ad-supported Hulu are numbered.

mikeryan 16y ago

If you're not a power watcher you can make this work at that price point. But as pointed out elsewhere Hulu is a trial service and still working out their model. It has quite a few shows but its totality is actually quite small. They're controlled by the networks and if you follow their TOS you should only be able to watch their shows on a pc NOT on a TV. Netflix's service is awesome but again quite limited. Sports is completely ignored in your model. ESPN makes $2-3 per cable subscriber whether you watch them or not. This equals about 1 billion (no joke) a year in revenues for them. So just to get ESPN it would cost about ~%10 of your viewing budget. Now its not just ESPN every network thats older than 5 years old gets a cut of your cable bill. Let alone the fact that you can't stream most local sports over the internet at this point. I see both sides of the argument and I thought as you do that cable is becoming more irrelevant. Heck on Monday the UFC's Roku channel launched - which allows users to bypass cable for PPV events. My company built that. But the truth is that the TV Networks are pretty inextricably tied at this point to the cable operators. Internet delivery of on-demand content at a reasonable rate doesn't yet make sense.