Recently Disney bought an estimated 30 percent stake in Hulu.com, bringing the streaming giant even closer to world domination, and adding to the credibility of its online-based television distribution force.
It is clear that Hulu.com and its partners have invested large sums of money into developing and funding this new media distribution center, yet anytime someone tries to bring this content to the general public and make it easy to use, they seem to go out of their way to hurt their own investment.
Take Boxee for example, they have developed an easy to use interface that collects all of the online media sources into one place for users of a broad range of operating systems. Instead of embracing and thanking them for this improved user interface and social media integration, Hulu’s partners demanded that Hulu take steps to ensure that their content wasn’t available on Boxee’s system.
Their chief concern according to many tech analysts is that the major media companies make more money from standard broadcast commercials than they do from online advertising. This sounds to me like the classic question of “What came first the chicken or the egg?”
It would seem logical to me that the best way to improve the value of your product for advertisers would be to reach as mainy people as possible. In a time of economically hardships such as these I would expect that advertisers, like any other business, would be looking for the most bang for their buck. I would state that online distribution is a much better advertising proposition for today’s market, for one simple reason. if I’m watching something I’ve recorded on my DVR equipped cable box, there is zero chance of me watching an ad. If I’m watching Hulu or one of the other major media online outlets that have built-in mandatory ads, I’m almost guaranteed to watch it unless I need to get up and refill my drink or perform another mundane tasks typically reserved for commercial breaks.
As it stands now, television has went from the world of ad supported shows of the 1960’s to the DVRed shows with no commercial breaks of the 21st Century.
Feel free to comment or rate this with the links below or I can be contacted at jparie@gmail.com.
I find with the shorter amount of time that i get with the online commercial breaks I dont always have time to get up so i will wait for it to finish and pause the video itself.
Hi, my Name is Giuseppe, I write from Italy.
Here we have a company that has just released a new ipTV set-top box, named BLOBbox. I’d like to buy it because they say they their model is open, so I will find more and more services and contents, in the future. Can I hope I will watch Hulu from my blobbox, in the future? Or will the Hulu guys stop any attempt to port their contents on it?