Hulu Subscription Service: $9.99 per month
It’s no longer rumor. Hulu announced today it will launch an all-platform service called Hulu Plus, streaming current season episodes, including, for the first time, Law & Order SVU. In addition to the subscription revenue, Hulu will be selling advertising.
So far it’s just in what they’re calling “preview” mode, what everyone else calls beta.
The last paragraph of the announcement is the one we find most interesting:
For our end users, we’re offering them the most convenient way to access their favorite shows, on devices they love, in high definition, at a fair price. For our advertisers, who allow us to keep our Hulu Plus price low with the support of ad revenue, we offer one of the world’s most effective advertising platforms, with the ability to speak effectively to users across a variety of devices, anywhere they happen to be. And finally, for our content partners, we offer revenues that compensate them fairly for bearing the cost of producing the shows we love.
Now we’ll see if the producers will fairly compensate actors now that there’s some “fair” revenue coming their way from online.
So, let me get this stright….
Hulu wants to charge me $9.95 to watch shows on my computer, with advertising, connected to an internet that cost me about $40 month, which I’m recieving from my cable company, which charges me money to connect to my TV so I can watch TV with advertising….all whioh I used to get from an antenna for free?
Wow, now that’s progress.
what is this – the Mob? Sounds like a great business model to me, boys….get moeny from them for which they used to get free,
I think your NOW in your closing sentence should be IF!
The very few people I talked about it with (non in the industry) said why pay for it? Unless we get rid of our cable (which gives us a lot more)why pay an additional $10 a month. Don’t have time to watch all the stuff now.
And of course, the fair revenue formular has to be established.
With all the platforms out there maybe it is time to re-think the whole residual formulars.
Right now it is based on the total possible eyes. Maybe it should be based on the actual number of eyes.
In Los Angeles there are now 100 Over-the-Air channels, it you have a decent antenna. But the trend is away from OTA. If the Comcast/NBC merger goes through OTA TV will probably get worse. And now the FCC wants the OTA channels to give up there bandwidth to internet broadband providers. Free TV should be protected.
Ain’t no one gonna pay…my 2 cents…no one is gonna pay…period..
They will look for a pirate site and get the product that way.
$9.99 per month??? Whadya kidding me?
“For our advertisers, who allow us to keep our Hulu Plus price low with the support of ad revenue”
I’ll pay $9.99 a month and I’ll still get to watch all those shows with the commercials intact?
Yep, this’ll work.
Because the rise of retrans fees are, IMO, the best hope for extending the useful life of broadcast TV, it is by no means clear to me that the Comcast/NBC merger is a bad thing –to the degree it eases the way along that road (and Comcast will be taking the money out of one pocket and putting it in the other, so it seems reasonable it would make it easier), then “the friends of broadcast” should welcome it.
Our local NBC affiliate plans to drop their -2 weather channel and use the bandwidth for a “mobile tv” channel instead. I’m not quite sure what that means, technically (i.e. will, say, I-Phone be able to receive that natively?), but it sounds interesting.
The estimates for requirements for bandwidth for mobile over the next 20 years or so are truly frightening, and will put a lot of pressure on broadcast. There are already mobile carrier technical studies out there, supported by the FCC, going after “white space” between existing TV channels (put there originally to prevent interference between channels). The mobile carriers are, of course, highly motivated to make that case that it won’t cause a problem for TV. From what I’m hearing, the TV engineers are not convinced.