News Corps.' Jon Miller Continues His War Against Free; Wants Hulu To Charge
from the that-will-go-over-poorly dept
Just last week we were talking about how News Corps' "chief digital officer" was claiming that free doesn't work, though his reasoning was incredibly weak. It was also incredibly ironic, because Miller's previous work included convincing Time Warner to turn AOL's walled garden into an open and free platform... which was the right move, but got him fired. Perhaps because of that, he now has an aversion to free and is trying to put up garden walls wherever he can, not realizing that the animals won't go back into a walled garden very easily. His latest suggestion, as sent in by robert, is that Hulu should start making shows available by paid subscription only. In other words, take all the good that Hulu did to get people to watch TV online with ads, rather than downloading unauthorized versions... and put it behind a paywall, to drive people right back to unauthorized downloads where there is no ad revenue.
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Filed Under: advertising, business models, economics, free, jon miller
Companies: hulu, news corp.
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I don't have a problem paying to watch shows
Hulu is trying to be the Cox, Verizon, Comcast, or Time-Warner of the web. Hulu will probably want you to sign up with them just like you do with cable tv now. No alacarte. Probably a tiered system.
My problem with Hulu is the fact that it is owned by a media giant. I would rather have a good open source client that hooked into networks like HBO. We don't need the middleman. Lets get the show straight from the source.
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Re: I don't have a problem paying to watch shows
I watch a lot of my shows on Netflix, and I don't mind paying because I don't have to watch commercials, and I can pause/rewind/fast forward as I see fit.
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Re: I don't have a problem paying to watch shows
A client to pull vids from the networks would be a middle man. Think it through.
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Miller and AOL
Oh really? You'd have a hard time convincing Time Warner shareholders of that now. The acquisition was a disaster for Time, because they just didn't think this one through. There was definitely an opportunity for Time there, but they squandered it. Making it free eliminated an income stream, turning AOL into an albatross. Instead of putting TW content exclusively on AOL and raising its value making subscriptions a viable option, they turned it into yet another internet portal. Big whoop.
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Re: Miller and AOL
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Re: Miller and AOL
Paywall restrictions just don't work unless your content is really something unique and special, and even then it's a ticking clock. Eventually someone will do the same or better for free to get your ad revenue.
The obvious exception to this is porn, but even in that arena unless you are offering some kind of unique twist or fetish it will be tough to get enough subscribers.
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Re: Miller and AOL
Heh. You got the timing wrong. AOL only went free in the past few years, after its subscriber base had massively dwindled. Going free didn't make it an albatross, it was the last ditch effort to turn it into something reasonable after the paywall had almost killed the business.
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Re: Re: Miller and AOL
AOL was locked into their dialup world, a system that has been pretty much wiped out by DSL, cable, and even 3g wireless networking at this point. AOL's "solution" was to let you get your own ISP and then pay more for their content on top of it. It works when they are the dialup portal, but on a net basis, they were not better or no worse than using Yahoo as your home page. There was very little reason for someone moving to a broadband solution to pay their ISP and then pay AOL some more.
However, as mentioned, AOL continued to generate content like an ISP with massive amounts of income to work with, which in the end made it too expensive to operate. As a portal, they aren't making the type of money they wish they were making.
Basic history. Calling it a "paywall" is ignorant of how they got there.
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Broadcast TV
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Re: Broadcast TV
Cost per user to send you that TV show is way higher than it is to have you watch it on broadcast. Worse, for every user you add watching in Hulu, the cost increases. You can add an endless number of users watching on broadcast, and each additional user actually drops the delivery cost per user.
Just because the internet CAN do something doesn't mean it's the best way to do it. Sort of like a dancing elephant at times.
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Re: Re: Broadcast TV
The main difference though is that Hulu is user-demand driven and Broadcast is content provider driven ... then again Hulu can reach a wider audience while Broadcast is limited to certain time periods - unless recorded by end users using additionally costly hardware.
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Re: Re: Broadcast TV
Either they profit from the ads or they don't. If they profit each additional user is additional revenue.
And the internet apparently is a better way to distribute video, otherwise so many people wouldn't be interested in it. Internet video allows the user more control. Broadcast doesn't deliver that at all. Pausing or watching a show when you want to is impossible without additional hardware. Ironically, that additional hardware removes the commercials.
Hulu is the only way broadcast corporations can rightly obtain ad revenue from someone like me. Maybe I'm such a small minority that no one cares. But if that were true, why is every other article on this site about piracy?
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Re: Re: Re: Broadcast TV
It's the reason why even in broadcast, shows that don't get huge numbers get tossed. 5 million viewers isn't enough to pay the bills. It is only when things scale (and your costs remain effectively fixed) that they can make money doing it.
What it comes down to is each view costs something online. Each view in broadcast costs nothing. Given similar ad revenues per viewer, which one do you think is the better business model?
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Even with DVD's smaller footprint they were still hesitant about doing full series releases. I remember when they were getting ready to release the Simpsons and they actually had a poll asking the fans whether they would prefer season boxes, "best of" boxes, or boxes based on characters or premises. And that was well into the DVD era.
And now they're saying the opposite. People who don't want to own a show, but still want to see it are being told "you have to pay." And what's really stupid is that distributing the shows over the internet gives their advertisers a huge amount of data.
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Apostrophe abuse
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Re: Apostrophe abuse
s' is possessive
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Re: Apostrophe abuse
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Re: Apostrophe abuse
"News Corpse" has a certain lovable ring to it.
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Idiots as usual
Just like I refuse to pay comcast (on demand) $1.49 to watch 22 minutes of a TV show in standard definition with 4 15 second commercials.
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Does he not know...
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When Hulu Charges
And ripping DVD's from Netflix
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1. I agree with the prediction that Hulu will not remove the ads if they put up a paywall/subscription wall, and so that would in fact be charging both the content provider/sponsor and the content viewer for a single transaction. I doubt this is necessary to generate enough revenue to be a going concern because
2. I imagine the unique internet visitor data that advertisers receive from Hulu's online OTA model has to be ridiculously valuable interms of CwC/S/F (Customers/Supporters/Fans) especially for the smaller non-profits and such that I've seen advertising on Hulu. Those organizations don't have huge budgets to build their community-of-support databases and Hulu advertising seems like an economical way to help build that asset.That value should drive the pricing of Hulu ads which should be enough to pay for the content. I can't imagine that is not as least as valuable to the advertising organization as ads on cable or radio.
3. And personally I think the pay-for-content models of iTunes and Netflicks are a better value than a subsciption fee. I have observed in my own purchasing decisions recently that while I am essentially incapapable of convincing myself of the value of subscribing to content online, I have found that free (to me the consumer) advertiser sponsored viewing of programming does actually lead to more (not less) iTunes/AppleTV purchases & rentals by me. I only pay for content I actually want to see and/or keep instead of subsidizing a bunch of suff I have no interest in.
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Great Prediction. History is often the best predictor, and this is pretty much what happened when Cable TV came out too- The promise of no ads, 15 channels all for $10.00 a month.
That didn't last long.
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They can't get me to watch for free, so yeah, they will charge the BOTS of the human race that have no integrity.
Doh
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Works for me. :)
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