IT Professionals

Hulu Cheapskates, There Is No Free Lunch

Posted by on Apr 22, 2010 | 8 Comments

Remember the 1960s 1990s when everything (online) was free for the using? Go ahead, download, play, utilize — the ad revenue will take care of it! Yes, those few years when  we were all drinking the DotCom Kool-Aid were magical. Flash forward into today; we live in a very different world. A revolutionary concept called “paying for value added” has been implemented with many services across the board and apparently, those looking for a “free ride” are not doing so well with the news.

Take the news of Hulu beginning to charge… sit down for this number, it’s huge… $9.95 for viewing older episodes of popular TV programming. Yes, let me say this again slowly. You still have the option of watching the five most recent episodes of popular programming. So, yeah. Clearly we need to riot in the streets over this one! How dare they not pay for something we can readily freeload! The insanity of it all!

The idea of asking users to compensate Hulu for the tremendous bandwidth used to play the more “long tail episodes” of programming is enough to make you want to run around screaming in frustration.

Okay seriously… give me a break!

Let’s look at the real situation, without the 1990s mentality of “gimme” for a second here.

  1. Hulu still allows me to create a queue of the latest shows, hook up my notebook to my 42″ flat screen TV, and enjoy TV for free. This gives me the latest programming at no charge.
  2. If, for some reason, I need to rot my brain further, I can dig around in the couch each month for the life changing sum of $10 to spend instead of donating nearly $100 ($80-90 something) a month for stuff on TV I never watched with cable!
  3. At the moment, Hulu commercials are less annoying than those on cable. And did I mention that the service is still basically free?

Maybe I just don’t fully appreciate how the people I see on the Web whining about spending $10 for backwards capable programming have a leg to stand on? Seriously, it’s like having on-demand but with the stuff you actually WANT to watch!

So long as Hulu sticks to using Flash (no Silverlight, thanks), keeps the Hulu Desktop open to all platforms and doesn’t start making it difficult to watch the content on the screen size of my choosing (aka my TV set), well, I’d tell those complaining to simply wander back to their illegal TV torrents and be sure to tell the ISPs hello when they shut you down. I mean, come on, it’s not like they were supporting the advertisers anyway. Clearly they found those “mean old commercials” irritating and unfair as well, I bet.

[awsbullet:Milton Friedman]

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  • http://www.ReliefMinistriesCCSarasota.com Curtis Hencye

    If you’re going to spend $10, why not go with Netflick for $9, get more movies and TV and no commercials, not to mention a new release DVD, one at a time mailed to your home!

  • D

    With the cost of TV tuners less than $50 US…I have a couple & record whatever I want to watch at a later time. Commercials…no problem. Get editing software to cut them out. Now…I can spend 42 minutes watching the actual show & not 18 minutes about male enhancement/depression drugs. Plus…I don’t get gouged for the DVD copies…since I all ready have the shows recorded without the commercials. Win…win all the way around!

  • http://thirdworldcounty.us David

    Well, since my internet connection is cable, and by having (basic) cable TV as a part of the package, I still come out ahead on price, I rarely bother with Hulu, as the basic cable package (now all the way up there at $15/month) has about 60 channels available–more than I want or ever use (especially as I eschew ALL Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind “news”). If I want to time-shift (very common; I rarely watch TV on a particular channel’s schedule) viewing any of those few shows I do enjoy (“Holmes on Homes”? Love it. :-) ), I just record ‘em with WMC… then convert the lousy WTV format to DVRMS and decommercialize it before watching–all automated, of course. I offload “keepers” to DVD or an external drive, if I expect to view one again soon for some reason, or if it’s one of my Wonder Woman’s fav programs she needs time-shifted for some reason.

    Hulu? On rare occasions I’ll check Hulu for something I may have missed recording. I begrudge even the 15 or 30 second Hulu commercials’s use of my eyeballs (when commercials _are_ on they’re invariably muted, anyway, when I’ve set the controls; TV commercials are just electronic lobotomy tools).

  • http://www.vasocreta.com Matthew Wilson

    OK, I really hate posts like this. Why does everyone gloss over the cost of access to the internet? On average, people pay $45/month to access the internet. So, $10 is not life changing. But tack that onto $45 and we get $55. And that is for one site. Wait, wait, there’s more! Lets say that news media outlets begin charging for their content. Another $5 here, $2.50 there. Heck…we just hit $62.50/month.

    So, lets please stop looking at only the small picture. Until the cost of internet access basically goes away, people will not be so willing to consider paying for content.

    Cable companies on the East Coast may be helping open the door to this one, btw. Parts of CT, NJ and NY have access to free internet.

    For the rest of us, however…not so much.

  • http://justenrobertson.com Justen

    Counterpoint:

    The cost to use a distributed network to archive and distribute media is negligible. The technology to fix the problem they’re attempting to solve with service fees already exists and it is already “free” (close enough to it to not matter anyway). The outrage of their customers is totally understandable; they could just hop on Pirate Bay and download the entire series in an afternoon, if they didn’t have to worry about armed thugs dragging them off to prison or stealing from them an entire western middle-class lifetime’s worth of income for doing it (let alone the amount that some 1.5 million means in economic terms anywhere else in the world).

    The only reason Hulu exists is that rent-seeking media companies think they ought to be able to leech a few hundred man-hours of work for profit for all eternity. Imagine if you’re a burger flipper at McDonalds. You make a burger. Someone eats it. You expect to be paid 10c a day for the rest of your life for that burger. Sound pretty stupid? Yeah. That’s called rent-seeking, and it’s counterproductive to everyone except the seeker, who needs to at some point learn that if he wants to continue making money he needs to continue producing value.

  • http://www.matthartley.com Matt Hartley

    Curtis: Good point and I already do. No cable/satellite here. I use my Roku and Hulu, so I am walking the walk, so to speak.

    Thankfully most of the content is free on Hulu, so it’s really not an issue. If it was, I would scrounge up a whopping $10 for anything else I need. ;)

  • Andrew Fomin

    Don’t forget, there is still free TV over the air. I am so tired of this belly aching about commercials. So, broadcasters have to make a living somehow, as those making a living on the internet have to run banner ads, and pop-up ads, and margin ads. Would you pay extra to an ISP to see an ad free internet? With the amount of ads on the web, we should be getting it for free.