Rumor: Hulu To Require Paid TV Subscription Soon Pages PREV 1 2 | |
Ridiculous. I know it's a rumor, but I can see it being totally infuriating. It just doesn't make sense though. They will probably lose customers this way. Paying more fees doesn't make it more attractive to people who don't use it yet, and less attractive to people who do use it. I'm calling BS on this, but it's a good thing I have no use for Hulu. I watch like 5 TV shows a year. Getting rid of cable was the best thing I could have done for myself. It's just a waste of money. I mean, I was paying like $200/month for a premium package because I never watched what was on basic, and then I said forget about it. Best thing I ever did. | |
Hurray for making their format even more unacceptable and even more unappealing than it otherwise already was! Great job Hulu! | |
If the rumor is true- a big if, as anyone looking at the numbers would likely try desperately to explain to the decision makers -this would be a massive mistake. No one I know is hooked enough on Hulu to follow along on this inane ride, plenty enough have cut the cord and have neither the budget nor desire to ever go back, and recent years have provided plenty of alternatives to conventional film & television, which could easily fill the void. ... No, not piracy, you strange person! I'm talking about the kinds of free programming done on YouTube and blip.tv and other places, stuff done by people who just wanna make quality work and entertain. You're not gonna get HBO-quality out of them, but you ARE going to get entertainment. And honestly, that's all a lot of folks want; entertainment. We want to get a laugh or a scare or pump our fist triumphantly. The budget used to GET us there isn't the point. So if the budget is crippling you, find either additional revenue streams- like, say, the ad-driven views on Hulu -or accept lower budgets. But for the love of Pete, don't try this kind of insane self-destructive bullshit. It's only going to damage your one reasonable in for the internet-loving cord-cutting crowd. | |
:/ tbh, I haven't been actively engaged in watching anything on TV for... quite some time, really. Sure, I'm missing out on some genuinely good articles, like Avatar: The Legend of Korra and Game of Thrones, but I'll get to watching them when I get to watching them - when irl stops screwing me over on when I can have some free time. I haven't really watched TV at all partially because there's very little on the TV that interests me (or that I can't just see on YouTube) or is playing when I happen to be using the TV. Having specific times that I need to be watching a network in order to catch a show is inconvenient to me, imo, since I can't always be 100% free at that certain time. It's why I like video gaming and even fricken reading more as a recreational hobby; you don't have to be at the exact place and time in order to catch what you want to watch, or have to slog through crap before what you wanted to watch comes on. I haven't really tried out Hulu, but from what I'm gathering from the article, Hulu won't be allowing people to watch videos unless they have an active cable subscription, which doesn't really make sense until you realize that Hulu's content is given by all of the major networks, meaning that whether they like it or not, THEY have to oblige to their wishes and demands or they'll be out of content (and out of business). It's almost the same as the relationship between cinemas and Hollywood: Either accept our lopsided business deals or you find some other movie studio that has a blockbuster movie to gather revenue for you. If you're willing to make that extra cost to watch your shows, then more to you, but tbh, there haven't been a lot of shows in recent years that I've actively WANTED to watch. | |
The whole point of Hulu for me is to avoid getting a cable subscription like the plague. I hate the watch on a schedule thing. I'm a busy person. I guess I can use my old email from my dad's cable company and use it, but, still, I don't like the principle of it at all. | |
Standard TV seems increasingly like a dying model. They've been forcing us to "bundle" channels for years, paying for content we don't want. It's virtually impossible to only get HBO if you just want to watch Game of Thrones, or only Comedy Central if you just want to watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report (thankfully those are available independently through Comedy Central, at least for now.) In a digital age, there's no good consumer-side excuse for that- and if legal means of getting the content we want aren't available, well, the obvious alternative is clearly attractive to an awful lot of people. Killing Hulu would be shooting itself in the foot in more ways than are immediately obvious, in other words. | |
You are correct. It is not collusion. It is in this case considered a horizontal monopoly without government approval, and it is in fact VERY illegal. | |
So they would charge you and still roll the ads? I call BS. An idea like this is like having people watching you cut your balls off. Sure you would have people throw some money, but eventually the cash flow is gonna stop, and the pain is going to be massive. Plausible yes, but unlikely. | |
The further the new caves to the old, the more we are dragged into the past, where the vultures maintain control, and ensure the survival of the monsters who feed off the universe just to survive, but not to LIVE. Our continued existence will only serve to remind us that we were unwilling to look beyond. Or, y'know, we could just not use these services and live in chaos like we did in the 00s. | |
I hadn't watched Tv or movies in almost a decade until last year due to Hulu and Netflix. If Hulu wants to make the service expensive, cool. It's no skin off my ass to go back to not watching. And I'm not even threating piracy. | |
Don't get mad, just don't pay. Capitalism is immune to rage but will crumble under the weight of withheld money. | |
Hulu's a low value/low cost luxury item. If the corporation who owns the product chooses to over value it. I'll have no reason to keep it. They would have to offer a ton more content to increase their current subscription price. And there is no amount of content they could tease me with to get me to become a cable subscriber again. Didn't they say at one point they were going to be a direct competitor of Netflix? Given this change in philosophy I don't see how that seems feasible... | |
16% of viewers now watch online rather than paying cable. So cable costs 100s and hulu nothing, no loss of revenue there then. When Hulu started streaming it was a bonus revenue, the numbers using didn't effect the subscription base. Now that significant numbers are using it instead of subscription is it surprising that cable companies move to stop the haemorrhage of income? Its not like the cable companies are refusing to stream it you just have to wait 1 week. | |
I'm sorry, I clearly went the wrong route using by using words instead of funny pictures. | |
The money you pay the cable companies doesn't go towards the financing of the shows. At all. That's all paid for by their advertisers. Every single cent you pay the cable company goes to the cable company and nowhere else. That's why most cable channels still have commercials. The ones that don't are "premium" channels that have special arrangements with the cable companies to get a portion of the money you pay for them. What I suspect is going on here is blackmail. The cable companies are threatening to drop the channels that also have a presence on Hulu unless Hulu agrees to this bogus arrangement. | |
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Untrue. Hulu is not competing with cable companies, it's allowing an alternative to the market division. There is no competition for cable companies, because they have already divided everybody up to prevent competition (the cost of laying multiple sets of cable has shielded cable companies in the past).
Also, Comcast is the only cable distributor who is a significant owner of Hulu. If they decide to honor accounts from other companies, that is most definitely collusion. I would assume that they make less money through Hulu than subscriptions, and this will force people to come running back to their local cable provider, who may or may very well not be Comcast.
The benefits are incredible. You don't have to provide quality customer service, you can charge what you want, you can impose data caps... In fact, the only thing you have to do is provide the channels that people want.
With collusion on as broad a scale as the cable companies, every practice is anti-competitive.