Is charging for Hulu is a video apocalypse or a breath of fresh air?

Neither. Charging for Hulu will cut back on the number of viewers. Free trumps a charge every time. Viewers will seek out the other free video content available legally or illegally.

For those TV networks using Hulu as a distribution channel this flight will be bad. They need to recoup their costs of production. With falling viewership on regular TV and weak financial support from web distribution they’ll trim back expenses, i.e. more experiments like Leno at 10 pm. They’ll have to reach a point where revenue = production costs + profit.

Media professionals like to think that their superior artistic skills and technical prowess are important to audience. We’re finding out if that’s true. Does the audience really care enough about the current standards of broadcast television production to pay for it? Or will low production cost, good enough TV fill the gap? Or will television professionals have to suck it up and work much less?

Stay tuned.

 

 

Evolutions and Trends Com 546 book review

Erik Barnouw A Tower in Babel A History of Broadcasting in the United States Volume 1 – to 1933. New York Oxford Press 1966

This first part of Barnouw’s three volume series on the history of broadcasting lays out the historic themes which have dominated industry ever since – independents and networks, government regulation and deregulation, commercialism versus education. It provides a fascinating look into the creation of the first electronic mass medium that journalist James Rorty said ‘has enabled American to hear itself’. The early formative days of radio presage the Internet era, which as allowed the world to talk to itself.

Wikinomics Review

In Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything Canadians Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams from the business strategy think tank New Paradigm, write a guide on the “profound changes in the nature of technology, demographics, and the global economy [that] are giving rise to new models of production based on community collaboration, and self-organization rather than hierarchy and control”.

Wealth of Networks review

“It seems passé today to speak of ‘the Internet revolution’. In some academic circles, it is positively naive. But it should not be.”

Tails You Win, Heads You Lose?

Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s 2006 book “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More” posits a radical shift in the mass market. He says we are moving away from a market dominated hits to a market where niches will play a larger role.