{"id":212901,"date":"2010-01-22T11:45:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-22T16:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:business.theatlantic.com,2010:\/\/3.34019"},"modified":"2010-01-22T11:43:21","modified_gmt":"2010-01-22T16:43:21","slug":"coming-soon-hulu-to-charge-for-30-rock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/212901","title":{"rendered":"Coming Soon: Hulu to Charge for ’30 Rock’"},"content":{"rendered":"

The ironic thing about all these industries like music and journalism wanting to build something just like Hulu is that Hulu doesn’t really want to be Hulu, anymore. The free ad-supported hub for movies and television is thinking about charging for its most popular shows<\/a>, like 30 Rock<\/i>, Modern Family<\/i> and House<\/i> … all of which I watch. Good news for media, possibly. Bad news for me. Damn my increasingly expensive middlebrow tastes!<\/p>\n

The Big Money’s Chadwick Matlin has done a marvelous<\/a> job<\/a>
\nexplaining the existential crisis at Hulu, which he sums up this way:
\n“Hulu’s business model is all the rage with everybody but its owners.”
\nRecently music makers have come together to roll out Vevo, a site that
\nplays high quality, ad-supported music videos. Journalism publishers
\nare close to launching an online magazine “storefront” where users pay
\nfor bundled magazine deals, or something like that.<\/a><\/p>\n

If
\nI had to guess, I’d think the future of Hulu is going to be a
\ncombination of free ad-supported television and paid content. The
\ntransition could happen slowly. First, Hulu might build a small paywall
\naround its most popular content to see how many users make the jump. If
\nthat works, it could turn to bundles. In other words, if you buy the
\nABC package you might pay $5 a month to watch every episode from every
\nABC show without ads. This would make Hulu work a lot like TV’s answer
\nto Netflix, which Chad reports announced 42 percent of its subscribers are streaming content digitally<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But this remains the central problem: If you want people to pay for
\njournalism, you can’t give it away from free. Magazines still give away
\nmost of their content online, so why would I ever want to visit a
\nswanky “storefront” to pay for what I already have? Similarly, in order
\nto make people pay to watch TV online, you have to stop giving it away
\nfor free on NBC.com, ABC.com and so forth. People don’t like spending
\nmoney, and they’re very good at finding loopholes around paid content
\n(…ask the music industry).


\n

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The ironic thing about all these industries like music and journalism wanting to build something just like Hulu is that Hulu doesn’t really want to be Hulu, anymore. The free ad-supported hub for movies and television is thinking about charging for its most popular shows, like 30 Rock, Modern Family and House … all of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-212901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212901\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}