Hulu's "Death Memo"

Yes, I've broken the 350 post mark, the highlight of any blogging career, surely. But I don't want to spin my wheels for a while - I just wanna get to it. You can read the big news if you just follow this link. Because you might be lazy, I'll paraphrase it for you also:

This is what may happen to Hulu.

Basically, some of the owners of Hulu are in conflict with each other. Disney on one side, Fox on the other, with ABC (and other parties) adding some more tension and goals to the proceedings. Among the changes being considered:

• taking Hulu to the "tv everywhere" model, where you'd have to have a valid cable subscription in order to watch regular old tv shows on Hulu;
• Fox and ABC reducing the amount of content that Hulu can host, even if that material is available on their own websites;
• increasing the number of commercials in the typical Hulu broadcast, by up to 4 extra ads.

Change can be a good thing, but not always. In this case, we're talking about a service that seems to have a great business model for getting popularity and site traffic. The actual revenue potential of Hulu didn't necessarily seem great, but the fact that people were watching it like TV made me assume that the ad revenue would play out somewhat like it does for TV.

Sometimes, tho, businesses need to change in order to stay afloat or add to their success. Other times, people just get greedy, and they ruin the whole thing. It's not clear to me which one of those two (or how much of both at once) is happening here. I just know that all these companies can afford to keep Hulu alive indefinitely. And they should.

The article linked above is well worth reading, and it provides not only deeper info, but a few rays of hope. Among them, that there's so much infighting among Hulu's owners on those changes; it's not clear when or if any of these changes will occur because of how strongly they disagree.

For my own part, I hope that nothing changes, as the biggest losers will be the people who use and enjoy the Hulu service...