Hulu Hype
March 9th, 2008 by Jeff LanctotTags: Hulu, TechCrunch, Video
TechCrunch has a post regarding Fortune’s recent Hulu profile. TC provides a summary of the way Hulu has been promoted, then and now; Fortune provides a positive (but accurate, imo) review of the site. I think it’s interesting that Michael takes issue with the hype surrounding Hulu. He might be correct that they are overhyping the product- he’s in a better position than I am to judge that matter. However, in my experience the Hulu team has been very understated in the way they’ve positioned the product to advertisers. They’ve actively sought out feedback on ad units, have not done a hard sell, and have been upfront about features not yet available. It sounds like Hulu’s approach to promoting the site (Michael’s experience) and their approach to generating revenue (my experience) are quite different.
2 Responses to “Hulu Hype”
Jeff, There is a lot of hype of Internet TV at conferences - Hulu included - mostly because people are skimming the surface.
The surge of Internet TV entrepreneurs promise movies and TV programs on any screen, anywhere, anytime, yet little attention is focused on the monumental challenge and new technologies needed to make video ubiquitous.
Hyperbole about broadcast television soon following dinosaurs to extinction bubbles at Internet TV gatherings from Sundance to NATPE. Yet traditional TV’s audience – 260 million viewers in the U.S. alone - is growing.
Rather than rob traditional TV of its audience, Internet TV – including popular user-generated-video sites – builds audiences for traditional TV network programs (see the report State of the Media 2007).Whenever a TV show can get more than 100,000 people to watch on the Internet they make money.
One of the significant obstacles that Internet TV companies aren\’t talking about at conferences is the transcoding challenge they face to reach consumers who want to watch videos on mobile telephones, computers, mp3 players, and other devices and do it over all sorts of networks.
That’s going to require videos to be transcoded into some 30 existing formats (various audio and video codecs, file formats, screen resolutions and bit rates) so everybody everywhere can watch whatever they want, wherever they want to watch it.
For example, YouTube transcodes 65,000 videos a day. Now YouTube is putting all of its existing videos on the Apple iPhone and Apple TV in a secondary format - H.264. This doubles YouTube’s transcoding needs each day. Transcoding isn’t cheap or easy.
Mary, I think you’re exactly right that the focus on Internet TV “stealing” traditional TV audiences is flawed. It’s nice to hear the networks talk about distribution of their programs across channels and in different formats. I think they recognize that the way programs are watched and advertising is sold has fundamentally changed. It’s a question of whether or not they can move quickly enough.