After much anticipation and rumors, Hulu officially announced Hulu Plus. Priced at $9.99 per month, it offers 3 distinctive benefits:
However, it also means ads. Hulu Plus is
a new, revolutionary ad-supported subscription product that is incremental and complementary to the existing Hulu service. For almost all of the current broadcast shows on our service, Hulu Plus offers the full season. Every single episode of the current season will be available, not just a handful of trailing episodes.
Almost a year ago, I'd said that Hulu should launch a paid model. The predicted price point was accurate and most of the features were accurate as well.
However, concerns still remain:
While the above are fairly minor concerns and could be fixed by content creators and Hulu, the largest concern is consumer adaption. For the first time, consumers have the ability to view content digitally via a subscription model. If someone is used to purchasing individual seasons on services like iTunes or Amazon Video-On-Demand, this is a great solution. For those who watch content for free, the price might be a stumbling block.
Hulu will continue to tweak the service and it'll be interesting to see how many people sign-up for the paid subscription. (prediction: 100,000 people by 2010)
It'll also be interesting to see if the free product is made available to mobile devices.
Aanarav Sareen is a content creator and digital media consultant. He blogs daily at Digital Media Business and publishes the monthly Digital Media Newsletter. He's also the host of the weekly Digital Media Podcast.
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Shelly Palmer: iPhone 4 Sex Chat Services
Sex chat services are already available on the iPhone 4, using the the FaceTime video chatting app. It only works when you have a WiFi connection, but that doesn't seem to be a deterrent. Can Apple do anything to stop the practice?
They are shooting themselves in the foot.
They're NOT cutting off free service, they'll still have it.
They ARE expanding it and adding full seasons for most of their shows, and back seasons for some, all in a PAID subscription model.
Sites like this don't run for free. To imagine that they do is, well, ludicrous . They currently have to PAY networks to run their shows in most cases, and then forfeit any ad revenue to the same networks, as the actors, etc, must be paid on a per view basis.
This + model actually WORKS to generate them revenue so they can expand their library. Seems to me that it works pretty well for everyone involved! Don't like it? Don't subscribe, but don't complain about them charging a very nominal fee for their product, because it is very much worth it!
$10/month is really nothing, honestly, and hulu actually cuts the ads down quite a bit as opposed to watching them on public TV