5 ms·

Hulu Struggles To Survive The Influence Of Its Parent Companies

49 points by Jaigus 14y ago

bmelton 14y ago
I am routinely baffled at some of the choices content-holders make regarding not just Hulu, but on-demand availability of their content. I remember when I first began watching "Shameless" on Showtime. I had missed pretty much the entire season before somebody recommended it to me. I found it on Verizon's "On-Demand" and watched a couple episodes, loved it, then came back the next day to find out that all the episodes had been pulled off of On Demand for a few months. I can only assume it was pulled to keep from scavenging DVD sales or something like that, but at that time, I hadn't watched enough to build up a love for the show that would have persuaded me to buy a DVD. I work from home, so I will often put TV shows on that I can mindlessly watch while I'm working. This generally excludes shows that require lots of attention, but most prime-time shows are pretty digestible with only a modicum of attention required. All too often, despite having all channels on FIOS, Netflix, Hulu Plus et al, I find that I can't watch the first season of a new show that looked interesting. You should _always_ give away at least the first few episodes so that I can get hooked. I don't have a problem with releasing the episodes the day after, or even a week late... but don't deny me the ability to fall in love with your show by only showing me the past few episodes, unless your show is only into its fifth episode of the first season.
- ta12121 14y ago
  We consumers might not like what they do, but I'm sure they know how to maximize profits. Why give shows away for free or a pittance, when people who care are willing to pay dollars per episode? I'm sure they're happy to give away quite a few users to whom an episode is worth a dime or a quarter in online ads, in exchange for getting to keep motivated viewers willing to buy the DVDs at $3 an episode.
  - bmelton 14y ago
    I understand and appreciate their right to do whatever they want to with it, but with perhaps very few exceptions, I can't imagine how you can justify not giving away the first few episodes as a loss-leader for people to actually get hooked on something. If I can't see the first episode, the chances of me 'jumping-on' are effectively nil, and I'm certainly not going to pay for something I don't love and haven't seen. Perhaps I'm not the average user, and I'm perfectly willing to accept that. And again, it's not like I don't respect their rights to do whatever the hell they want, it just doesn't make sense to me. Ultimately, there's not a TV show or movie that I can't live without seeing, but not ever letting me see your show isn't a way to maximize profits, at least from me.
    - Jaigus 14y ago
      I've seen showtime do the same thing with Spartacus and Dexter. They've both been on and off netflix multiple times, yet showtime did provide the season premiere for both of these series free of charge on their site. This practice definitely makes good sense, and I'm sure it will start catching on.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  I share your amazement but at Teller (of Penn & Teller) said in one of his interviews, "People only believe what they are prepared to believe." Over the years I've discovered that while this makes a lot of magic tricks possible, it also profoundly affects how people react to environmental changes. Whether its executives at a large content conglomerate debating the economics of content or parents at a school debating the validity of the scientific method, if someone is given a choice of what to believe, and one choice would violate some other deeply held belief, they always choose to believe the explanation that doesn't challenge the status quo. Regardless of how ridiculous it might seem to a neutral third party observer. This mis-feature in the human brain seems to cause a lot of trouble. The deeply held belief that I have heard expressed by many different big content holders is that the 'true value' of a work can only realized by keeping absolute control over the use of that work. Thus they work to maintain absolute control by technology, by regulation, and by the force of law.
  - sparky 14y ago
    Our tendency to minimize cognitive dissonance has a lot of terrible consequences, but the Wikipedia article points out a few ways besides magic tricks that we can exploit it for good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Applications_of_cognitive_dissonance_research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Applicatio...
GBKS 14y ago
Since the article mentions the site redesign, I think this new design is not going to work out for them. The information density is too low, resulting in the site feeling empty and making it less interesting to browse around. I think they'll lose a lot of casual viewers because of this. My assessment may be wrong and I am curious to see how this plays out.
- felipemnoa 14y ago
  I think your assessment is spot on. It feels like a step backward. It is really annoying now to browse entire seasons of a series.
- NathanKP 14y ago
  Just to offer the opposite opinion, as a frequent user of Hulu I love the new redesign. To me it has less of the useless stuff and more of the useful stuff immediately available. The new front page has helped me discover many new shows that I wouldn't have found any other way Additionally the new design feels much faster and more responsive. If given a choice I would not go back to the old design.
w1ntermute 14y ago
It's astonishing how difficult it is for content companies to get this right. Torrent sites have had it down for more than half a decade. I started using private torrent sites to obtain TV shows more than 6 years ago, and even though very little has changed in a substantial way since then (excepting the rise of Project Gazelle), the process is great. You can download any show, any time you want after the show has been released (+15 to 20 minutes), with no restrictions. I find it ridiculous that this is still an issue in 2012.
- res0nat0r 14y ago
  The torrent sites have it right because you are getting content that should be paid for for free, no wonder why they are popular.
  - w1ntermute 14y ago
    What the torrent sites are getting right isn't the price, it's the UX. I actually pay $20/month for a seedbox, but that's worth it to me because the UX with torrents is far superior to Netflix, Hulu, or anything else out there.
    - tsotha 14y ago
      But they have unlimited freedom on the UX because they don't have to worry about protecting their content. It's a much easier environment to work with.
      - trafficlight 14y ago
        As if the networks' current protection schemes are doing them any good...
        tsotha 14y ago
        Probably not, or at least not much. But you can't blame them for trying to keep Hulu on a short leash.
emperorcezar 14y ago
The big corporate egos can't step aside and allow a business to be successful.
surrealize 14y ago
It's a little disappointing that we're even having this conversation at all. Online content should be so much more valuable than broadcast content, both to consumers and advertisers. And yet, online is still the red-headed stepchild. Online content can target ads individually! I've filled out the survey on Hulu, they know that I'm a guy, my age, etc. They probably have pretty good guesses about my income and my interests. The full set of shows that I watch paints a pretty detailed picture of who I am and what I like. In an ideal world, they could use that information to show me very precisely targeted ads. That famous quote, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." is probably mostly right, except I'd bet that it's a lot more than half that gets wasted. And Hulu should have the ability to fix that, by individually targeting ads! But they're still showing me, a fairly nerdy guy, lots of Febreze ads and Glade sense & spray ads and even the occasional tampon ad or whatever. Google is proof that precisely targeted ads are really, really valuable. And I think targeting ads well even makes them less annoying; if you're showing me something that's actually relevant to me, I feel less like my time is being wasted. But Hulu and its advertisers still haven't figured out how to match up ads and users. It's sad. But whoever actually solves this problem will make oodles of money.
- 001sky 14y ago
  Online content should be so much more valuable than broadcast content, both to consumers and advertisers This assertion is not correct. Yet. The reality is that as an advertsing medium, the internet is far inferior. There are reasons for this. For lead gen and seach, online is good. Unless you can make the case otherwise, though, this does not hold in other areas. You can't just assert that they are similar. Source: Its been refuted by the market. To date.
  - surrealize 14y ago
    That's why I said "should be". Individual targeting should be really powerful--just look at google. But Hulu so far hasn't been able to do a good job of individual targeting. I'm sure there are reasons why; it'd be interesting to hear what they are rather than just "there are reasons".
andyl 14y ago
I worked for a streaming media startup that partnered with old-line media parents. Parents killing their new-media spawn is by now well-established practice, and nobody should be surprised about the struggles of Hulu. The media giants depend on their existing distribution partners - cable companies, DVD sales and theatrical. They aren't going to put these channels at risk. Streaming media won't be first-class until a new streaming-centric content power emerges, or until the strength of cable is broken. Eventually the transition will happen. But when. In our lifetime? Not sure.
twodayslate 14y ago
They need to make Hulu Plus more appealing. I am currently subscribed to it but I have no reason to resubscribe. I can't find any of the shows or movies I want to watch on it that aren't already on Netflix.
- fossuser 14y ago
  I hate hulu plus. If I'm paying a monthly fee for something I don't want to have to sit through an enormous amount of advertising. This is doubly true online when it's trivial to get it a higher quality version without advertising for free. I'm happy to pay the monthly fee for the convenience of advertisement free streaming (which is why I love netflix and spotify), but it's insulting to pay to watch advertising (and even more so when you also have a cable subscription). All hulu plus does is what cable tv should have started doing years ago which is let you watch all shows on demand, it fixes nothing else and charges too much for that obvious privilege. The way the introduced ads also bothered me and reminded me of how the cable networks brought them in (initially cable tv had no advertising which is one of the reasons you paid for it).
Spooky23 14y ago
Media companies suck. CBS now delays start times by 2 minutes to break DVRs. And certain shows (ie person of interest) don't exist legally on the Internet. What do they expect people to do?
nitrogen 14y ago
How streaming should work in 2012: a provider-agnostic protocol allows any video producer to place content online, either for streaming or download. There are no codec wars or patent issues. Digital video "warehouses" collect all these sources of video, providing bandwidth and an open API for purchasing streaming and/or download rights to a video, with a simple algorithmic pricing structure. Frontend websites and applications then compete for user attention, mixing and matching video from any source they please, with the only requirement that they pay the streaming rate to the video aggregator. Any video, any time, with any UI. Instead we have ever-increasing ad durations, limited episode selection, proprietary players with terrible video quality (e.g. some of them use nearest neighbor scaling in fullscreen, there's no vsync so there's massive tearing and jitter, the latest versions of Flash for Linux and YouTube swap the red and blue color channels, etc.). Television as a medium is broken, IMO: advertisements are timed to start right at the point your mind starts to get absorbed into a show, causing frustration and a desire to change channels or close the tab.
- lukifer 14y ago
  > simple algorithmic pricing structure I'm completely on board with everything you're saying, but algorithmic pricing is non-trivial; were it to be achieved, it would fundamentally rewrite the rules of economics as we know it. Prices aren't decided by value or fairness, but by negotiating leverage. If Mad Men knows they're in high demand, they ask a high price or walk; if Netflix knows that a horror B-movie is in low demand, they offer a low price or walk. Getting content owners to cede their negotiating power in either case to a universal formula will be nigh-impossible without fundamentally rewriting IP law (which for the record, I am enthusiastically in favor of).
  - nitrogen 14y ago
    It is my opinion that in an ideal world (ideal as in, most pleasant for humans to inhabit), pricing of video would be constant, and high demand would be its own reward through higher sales volume.
pandaman 14y ago
I used to be a Hulu+ subscriber until they introduced the "brain-spray awesome" experience last month. Now I am not a subscriber and since there is no free Hulu to watch on TV - not even a customer. They took away the ability to add an entire show to queue and the notifications of the new episodes in the shows in your queue among many other things. I am not sure who thought the removal of these features is somehow making the service better but I would be really surprised if it were its parent companies. Seeing how the company spends money to cripple whatever UX it had before and lose customers I imagine Hulu has much bigger problems than the influence of its parent companies.
- dangrossman 14y ago
  They didn't take that away. You just click the favorite button on the show's page. Updates to that show are added to your queue. All that changed is the name (Favorite instead of Add to Queue).
  - pandaman 14y ago
    "Updates to that show are added to your queue" != "all show episodes are added to your queue". There used to be a choice: "subscribe to new episodes" and "subscribe to all episodes" now there is not and it's "subscribe to new episodes" only.
tylermenezes 14y ago
> Hulu ... $600 million this year > TV still generates more than $70 billion ... viewership is down 12.5% I can totally understand their decision here. Hulu cost them 9b in revenue, and only returned 600m. (Whether this drop is actually because of Hulu or not is more at issue, but I can see them thinking it is.)
- jimbobob 14y ago
  Just curious... where are you getting the $9B number from?
  - dsk2012 14y ago
    Looks like 70*0.125
Aron 14y ago
So how much could Netflix pull in with ads? They streamed a billion hours in June, so if it was one ad per half-hour (on average), at 30$ CPM does that imply 60M$\month? That's a serious amount of money.

49 points by Jaigus 14y ago

I am routinely baffled at some of the choices content-holders make regarding not just Hulu, but on-demand availability of their content. I remember when I first began watching "Shameless" on Showtime. I had missed pretty much the entire season before somebody recommended it to me. I found it on Verizon's "On-Demand" and watched a couple episodes, loved it, then came back the next day to find out that all the episodes had been pulled off of On Demand for a few months. I can only assume it was pulled to keep from scavenging DVD sales or something like that, but at that time, I hadn't watched enough to build up a love for the show that would have persuaded me to buy a DVD. I work from home, so I will often put TV shows on that I can mindlessly watch while I'm working. This generally excludes shows that require lots of attention, but most prime-time shows are pretty digestible with only a modicum of attention required. All too often, despite having all channels on FIOS, Netflix, Hulu Plus et al, I find that I can't watch the first season of a new show that looked interesting. You should _always_ give away at least the first few episodes so that I can get hooked. I don't have a problem with releasing the episodes the day after, or even a week late... but don't deny me the ability to fall in love with your show by only showing me the past few episodes, unless your show is only into its fifth episode of the first season.

ta12121 14y ago
We consumers might not like what they do, but I'm sure they know how to maximize profits. Why give shows away for free or a pittance, when people who care are willing to pay dollars per episode? I'm sure they're happy to give away quite a few users to whom an episode is worth a dime or a quarter in online ads, in exchange for getting to keep motivated viewers willing to buy the DVDs at $3 an episode.
- bmelton 14y ago
  I understand and appreciate their right to do whatever they want to with it, but with perhaps very few exceptions, I can't imagine how you can justify not giving away the first few episodes as a loss-leader for people to actually get hooked on something. If I can't see the first episode, the chances of me 'jumping-on' are effectively nil, and I'm certainly not going to pay for something I don't love and haven't seen. Perhaps I'm not the average user, and I'm perfectly willing to accept that. And again, it's not like I don't respect their rights to do whatever the hell they want, it just doesn't make sense to me. Ultimately, there's not a TV show or movie that I can't live without seeing, but not ever letting me see your show isn't a way to maximize profits, at least from me.
  - Jaigus 14y ago
    I've seen showtime do the same thing with Spartacus and Dexter. They've both been on and off netflix multiple times, yet showtime did provide the season premiere for both of these series free of charge on their site. This practice definitely makes good sense, and I'm sure it will start catching on.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
I share your amazement but at Teller (of Penn & Teller) said in one of his interviews, "People only believe what they are prepared to believe." Over the years I've discovered that while this makes a lot of magic tricks possible, it also profoundly affects how people react to environmental changes. Whether its executives at a large content conglomerate debating the economics of content or parents at a school debating the validity of the scientific method, if someone is given a choice of what to believe, and one choice would violate some other deeply held belief, they always choose to believe the explanation that doesn't challenge the status quo. Regardless of how ridiculous it might seem to a neutral third party observer. This mis-feature in the human brain seems to cause a lot of trouble. The deeply held belief that I have heard expressed by many different big content holders is that the 'true value' of a work can only realized by keeping absolute control over the use of that work. Thus they work to maintain absolute control by technology, by regulation, and by the force of law.
- sparky 14y ago
  Our tendency to minimize cognitive dissonance has a lot of terrible consequences, but the Wikipedia article points out a few ways besides magic tricks that we can exploit it for good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Applications_of_cognitive_dissonance_research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Applicatio...

GBKS 14y ago

Since the article mentions the site redesign, I think this new design is not going to work out for them. The information density is too low, resulting in the site feeling empty and making it less interesting to browse around. I think they'll lose a lot of casual viewers because of this. My assessment may be wrong and I am curious to see how this plays out.

felipemnoa 14y ago
I think your assessment is spot on. It feels like a step backward. It is really annoying now to browse entire seasons of a series.
NathanKP 14y ago
Just to offer the opposite opinion, as a frequent user of Hulu I love the new redesign. To me it has less of the useless stuff and more of the useful stuff immediately available. The new front page has helped me discover many new shows that I wouldn't have found any other way Additionally the new design feels much faster and more responsive. If given a choice I would not go back to the old design.

w1ntermute 14y ago

It's astonishing how difficult it is for content companies to get this right. Torrent sites have had it down for more than half a decade. I started using private torrent sites to obtain TV shows more than 6 years ago, and even though very little has changed in a substantial way since then (excepting the rise of Project Gazelle), the process is great. You can download any show, any time you want after the show has been released (+15 to 20 minutes), with no restrictions. I find it ridiculous that this is still an issue in 2012.

res0nat0r 14y ago
The torrent sites have it right because you are getting content that should be paid for for free, no wonder why they are popular.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  What the torrent sites are getting right isn't the price, it's the UX. I actually pay $20/month for a seedbox, but that's worth it to me because the UX with torrents is far superior to Netflix, Hulu, or anything else out there.
  - tsotha 14y ago
    But they have unlimited freedom on the UX because they don't have to worry about protecting their content. It's a much easier environment to work with.
    - trafficlight 14y ago
      As if the networks' current protection schemes are doing them any good...
      - tsotha 14y ago
        Probably not, or at least not much. But you can't blame them for trying to keep Hulu on a short leash.

emperorcezar 14y ago

The big corporate egos can't step aside and allow a business to be successful.

surrealize 14y ago

It's a little disappointing that we're even having this conversation at all. Online content should be so much more valuable than broadcast content, both to consumers and advertisers. And yet, online is still the red-headed stepchild. Online content can target ads individually! I've filled out the survey on Hulu, they know that I'm a guy, my age, etc. They probably have pretty good guesses about my income and my interests. The full set of shows that I watch paints a pretty detailed picture of who I am and what I like. In an ideal world, they could use that information to show me very precisely targeted ads. That famous quote, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." is probably mostly right, except I'd bet that it's a lot more than half that gets wasted. And Hulu should have the ability to fix that, by individually targeting ads! But they're still showing me, a fairly nerdy guy, lots of Febreze ads and Glade sense & spray ads and even the occasional tampon ad or whatever. Google is proof that precisely targeted ads are really, really valuable. And I think targeting ads well even makes them less annoying; if you're showing me something that's actually relevant to me, I feel less like my time is being wasted. But Hulu and its advertisers still haven't figured out how to match up ads and users. It's sad. But whoever actually solves this problem will make oodles of money.

001sky 14y ago
Online content should be so much more valuable than broadcast content, both to consumers and advertisers This assertion is not correct. Yet. The reality is that as an advertsing medium, the internet is far inferior. There are reasons for this. For lead gen and seach, online is good. Unless you can make the case otherwise, though, this does not hold in other areas. You can't just assert that they are similar. Source: Its been refuted by the market. To date.
- surrealize 14y ago
  That's why I said "should be". Individual targeting should be really powerful--just look at google. But Hulu so far hasn't been able to do a good job of individual targeting. I'm sure there are reasons why; it'd be interesting to hear what they are rather than just "there are reasons".

andyl 14y ago

I worked for a streaming media startup that partnered with old-line media parents. Parents killing their new-media spawn is by now well-established practice, and nobody should be surprised about the struggles of Hulu. The media giants depend on their existing distribution partners - cable companies, DVD sales and theatrical. They aren't going to put these channels at risk. Streaming media won't be first-class until a new streaming-centric content power emerges, or until the strength of cable is broken. Eventually the transition will happen. But when. In our lifetime? Not sure.

twodayslate 14y ago

They need to make Hulu Plus more appealing. I am currently subscribed to it but I have no reason to resubscribe. I can't find any of the shows or movies I want to watch on it that aren't already on Netflix.

fossuser 14y ago
I hate hulu plus. If I'm paying a monthly fee for something I don't want to have to sit through an enormous amount of advertising. This is doubly true online when it's trivial to get it a higher quality version without advertising for free. I'm happy to pay the monthly fee for the convenience of advertisement free streaming (which is why I love netflix and spotify), but it's insulting to pay to watch advertising (and even more so when you also have a cable subscription). All hulu plus does is what cable tv should have started doing years ago which is let you watch all shows on demand, it fixes nothing else and charges too much for that obvious privilege. The way the introduced ads also bothered me and reminded me of how the cable networks brought them in (initially cable tv had no advertising which is one of the reasons you paid for it).

Spooky23 14y ago

Media companies suck. CBS now delays start times by 2 minutes to break DVRs. And certain shows (ie person of interest) don't exist legally on the Internet. What do they expect people to do?

nitrogen 14y ago

How streaming should work in 2012: a provider-agnostic protocol allows any video producer to place content online, either for streaming or download. There are no codec wars or patent issues. Digital video "warehouses" collect all these sources of video, providing bandwidth and an open API for purchasing streaming and/or download rights to a video, with a simple algorithmic pricing structure. Frontend websites and applications then compete for user attention, mixing and matching video from any source they please, with the only requirement that they pay the streaming rate to the video aggregator. Any video, any time, with any UI. Instead we have ever-increasing ad durations, limited episode selection, proprietary players with terrible video quality (e.g. some of them use nearest neighbor scaling in fullscreen, there's no vsync so there's massive tearing and jitter, the latest versions of Flash for Linux and YouTube swap the red and blue color channels, etc.). Television as a medium is broken, IMO: advertisements are timed to start right at the point your mind starts to get absorbed into a show, causing frustration and a desire to change channels or close the tab.

lukifer 14y ago
> simple algorithmic pricing structure I'm completely on board with everything you're saying, but algorithmic pricing is non-trivial; were it to be achieved, it would fundamentally rewrite the rules of economics as we know it. Prices aren't decided by value or fairness, but by negotiating leverage. If Mad Men knows they're in high demand, they ask a high price or walk; if Netflix knows that a horror B-movie is in low demand, they offer a low price or walk. Getting content owners to cede their negotiating power in either case to a universal formula will be nigh-impossible without fundamentally rewriting IP law (which for the record, I am enthusiastically in favor of).
- nitrogen 14y ago
  It is my opinion that in an ideal world (ideal as in, most pleasant for humans to inhabit), pricing of video would be constant, and high demand would be its own reward through higher sales volume.

pandaman 14y ago

I used to be a Hulu+ subscriber until they introduced the "brain-spray awesome" experience last month. Now I am not a subscriber and since there is no free Hulu to watch on TV - not even a customer. They took away the ability to add an entire show to queue and the notifications of the new episodes in the shows in your queue among many other things. I am not sure who thought the removal of these features is somehow making the service better but I would be really surprised if it were its parent companies. Seeing how the company spends money to cripple whatever UX it had before and lose customers I imagine Hulu has much bigger problems than the influence of its parent companies.

dangrossman 14y ago
They didn't take that away. You just click the favorite button on the show's page. Updates to that show are added to your queue. All that changed is the name (Favorite instead of Add to Queue).
- pandaman 14y ago
  "Updates to that show are added to your queue" != "all show episodes are added to your queue". There used to be a choice: "subscribe to new episodes" and "subscribe to all episodes" now there is not and it's "subscribe to new episodes" only.

tylermenezes 14y ago

> Hulu ... $600 million this year > TV still generates more than $70 billion ... viewership is down 12.5% I can totally understand their decision here. Hulu cost them 9b in revenue, and only returned 600m. (Whether this drop is actually because of Hulu or not is more at issue, but I can see them thinking it is.)

jimbobob 14y ago
Just curious... where are you getting the $9B number from?
- dsk2012 14y ago
  Looks like 70*0.125

Aron 14y ago

So how much could Netflix pull in with ads? They streamed a billion hours in June, so if it was one ad per half-hour (on average), at 30$ CPM does that imply 60M$\month? That's a serious amount of money.