Hulu Struggles To Survive The Influence Of Its Parent Companies

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.<p>Online content can target ads <i>individually</i>! 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.<p>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 &#38; spray ads and even the occasional tampon ad or whatever.<p>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.<p>It's sad. But whoever actually solves this problem will make oodles of money.

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 <i>any</i> show, <i>any</i> time you want after the show has been released (+15 to 20 minutes), with <i>no</i> restrictions. I find it ridiculous that this is still an issue in <i>2012</i>.

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.

I am routinely baffled at some of the choices content-holders make regarding not just Hulu, but on-demand availability of their content.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

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.<p>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.<p>Eventually the transition will happen. But when. In our lifetime? Not sure.

How streaming <i>should</i> 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.<p>Instead we have ever-increasing ad durations, limited episode selection, proprietary players with <i>terrible</i> 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.

&#62; Hulu ... $600 million this year<p>&#62; TV still generates more than $70 billion ... viewership is down 12.5%<p>I can totally understand their decision here. Hulu cost them 9b in revenue, and only returned 600m.<p>(Whether this drop is actually because of Hulu or not is more at issue, but I can see them thinking it is.)

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.

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.

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.<p>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.

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.<p>What do they expect people to do?

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