Discussions of cancelled shows aside (I'm looking at you, FOX ), my most recent complaint is with the way networks have started treating Hulu recently.
This has sort of been building in my head for a while, from when I noticed that new Burn Notice episodes weren't getting put up until 30 days after the air date. This was new this season, and kinda pissed me off, but I figured, ok, whatever, I can wait a month...no big deal...kinda annoying that I can't talk about new episodes with my friends who actually pay for cable, but hey, we have plenty of other stuff to talk about. And I went on with my life.
Now bring in today, when I realized that I hadn't seen a new episode of Eureka or Warehouse 13 in a while. I knew I had seen episodes from the current season, and after checking with my trusty friend epguides.com, I knew that there were new episodes that had come out that I hadn't seen yet. So I went over to the Hulu page for those shows to see if there was anything there to indicate what was going on.
...and I saw this...
Upon further investigation, it appears that (unsurprisingly) all of the shows by these two networks (USA and SciFi) are under the same streaming restrictions. This article sums it up pretty well.The first two episodes of Warehouse 13 were made available the day after they aired on television. New episodes will stream in late September.
http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pi...-hulu-2011085/
Now, keeping in mind that the networks that are making these drastic changes have a part ownership in Hulu, and thus do actually have a financial stake in whether or not it succeeds and is profitable, I am at a loss to understand why they are doing this. Wasn't one of the original reasons for making Hulu to monetize a previously untapped portion of the market, aka, pirates? You give people the ability to watch your shows for free, with commercials, easily and conveniently online. Build a functional, well designed, website around it to let them automatically get new episodes as you post them, and you might just pull in some of those pirates and actually make money off them. And guess what? It worked! I would say probably around 70-80% of the people I have talked to who pirate stuff do it for the convenience factor. So guess what? If you present a service to them that is more convenient than piracy, they will flock to it in droves. This isn't speculation, like it was several years ago when Hulu and Netflix were first starting up. It is fact. According to the Alexa web rankings, Hulu is ranked #50 in the US with over 1.5 million hits per day (93.7% coming from the US)! How many of those are former pirates or people who either never would have watched any of those shows in the first place? I'm going to guess a lot. I can understand companies like Comcast wanting to kill sites like Hulu since they offer a competing service using Comcast's own resources. But the networks? What possible reason could they have for doing this? The only goal I can think of that makes any sense is that they are trying to drive people to watching new episodes on traditional TV services. But hey, USA? SciFi? I've got news for you. Most of the people who use Hulu to watch those new shows use it because they don't have traditional TV service. Well, that or it's just a lot more convenient to access the same content on Hulu. And here's another piece of advice. You know all those pirates you were making money off of with Hulu? Yeah, I can pretty much guarantee that their reaction to this is not going to be to sign up for a traditional TV service plan and watch your shows there. Their reaction will be to go back to piracy. And you will no longer make any money off of them enjoying your shows.
I should explain, I am not promoting piracy. Far from it; if the people making the shows we all enjoy don't make money from us watching them (whether through commercial revenue, DVD sales, or whatever), they won't have any incentive (or ability) to make more. My problem with all this is that I cannot see any logical business plan in which a move like this makes any sense.