Hulu was founded in 2007 and is owned by NBC Universal, Fox and Disney-ABC, in case you didn’t know. In November 2010, Hulu Plus launched as subscription model with access to additional content.
The idea is to give consumers access to content at an affordable enough rate that they will pay for it and not pirate the content yet still create a profit for Hulu’s owners.
The idea is to make content available “Anywhere, Anytime.” It’s the anytime part that Hulu can’t seem to get right.
If you are a frequent Hulu viewer, then you have undoubtedly experienced difficulties getting videos to play, at times resulting in Hulu just giving up and saying, “This video is unavailable at this time.”
And as much as they apologize for the inconvenience, it’s still dang inconvenient!
Enter online piracy, which costs the U.S. economy $22 billion annually
Imagine being a consumer who wants to watch the latest episode of Vampire Diaries (I watch it for my wife’s sake) and the video won’t start. You’re paying $8/mo for access to the content in addition to still watching commercials. So you try reloading the page a couple of times and the video finally starts. But Hulu still struggles and the quality of the video fluctuates.
Or…you don’t pay anything, don’t watch any commercials, watch a high-quality copy and stream it illegally.
Hopefully you can see now why online piracy is so pervasive – content creators are not getting consumers the content “anywhere, anytime” at a price they’re willing to pay.
And I’m not saying that the content has to be free. Consumers will pay.
Consider Veronica Mars’ Kickstarter success and download blunder
Cancelled after three seasons, fans of Veronica Mars weren’t content. Writer and director Rob Thomas took to Kickstarter to fund a Veronica Mars movie. Of the $2,000,000 needed, consumers paid $5,702,153!
Yep, you read that correctly. Fans paid almost three times as much as was asked to see the movie made.
The movie was released on March 14, 2014, and backers who donated at least $35 were promised a digital copy, which was made available via Flixster.
But here’s the kicker. A portion of the backers couldn’t get the download to work!
They paid $35 to get a movie and then couldn’t get the movie. The entire experience is best summed up in this single tweet:
Spent half an hour trying to get my legitimate copy of Veronica Mars to play on the TV with Flixster. Only takes 7 minutes to "steal" it.
— Bob Ippolito (@etrepum) March 15, 2014
So why keep paying when the content creators make it difficult to access the content and have a good, consistent experience?
Net neutrality is in part to blame
I recognize that ISPs are partially to blame for the reason the streaming experience isn’t as good as it should be. They throttle the bandwidth.
Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, just posted an open letter to ISPs asking for strong net neutrality. If you aren’t already familiar with net neutrality, then I recommend that you get familiar. Because it will impact your Internet experience and the viability of start-ups.
Either way though, media companies need to step up their game in making content available anywhere, anytime at the right price if they want to combat online piracy.
(Photo courtesy of Albumarium.com)