You’ve waited for it. You’ve prayed for it. You’ve spilled the blood of countless sacrificial chickens for it. And now it’s here: Hulu Plus for Xbox 360. The service is launching tomorrow and you’re basically getting the Hulu interface with which you’re familiar plus a few Kinect add-ons including voice control and gestures. With sufficient bandwidth you also… → Read More
By the end of this year, an estimated 2 million households in the U.S. will have abandoned TV for the Web, cutting the cord with their cable companies. This estimate comes from Convergence Consulting Group, a Toronto-based research firm with a new report on The Battle for the American Couch Potato. That 2 million is up from the 1.6 million it was estimating a year ago, but it is still rather… → Read More
ComScore has just released data from its Video Metrix service, showing that 170 million Internet users in the United States watched online video content in February for an average of 13.6 hours per viewer.
According to the audience measurement giant, the total U.S. Internet audience engaged in more than 5 billion viewing sessions during the course of last month. Google Sites (read: YouTube) again… → Read More
In a new report on digital trends in 2010
When it comes to premium video on the Web, Hulu still rules. In the fourth quarter, the U.S. online audience watched 19.4 billin minutes of video on Hulu, which was twice as much as the how much viewers watched on the websites of the five major TV networks combined. Viewers watched another 9.7 billion minutes of online video on the websites of ABC, CBS… → Read More
I’ve witnessed the media frenzy that comes with the Super Bowl – and the commercials that air on TV before, during and after the event – from a distance (from Belgium, to be more precise) several times now, and still can’t be anything but baffled by its sheer ferociousness. TechCrunch also did its part by listing all tech-related Super Bowl ads.
Question is: did people dig them? Not really, says… → Read More
Hulu has just struck a content partnership with Viacom to return “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report” to the content platform.
The deal also includes other TV Shows from Viacom’s media networks, including Comedy Central, MTV, BET, VH1, Spike TV, and TV Land to the Hulu Plus subscription service. Viacom had previously pulled the two Comedy Central shows from Hulu last March. → Read More
Netflix is interesting because it is the first service to follow the disruptive arc of the iPad. Every time the iPad is analyzed, the projections are anywhere from just plain wrong to what amounts to a niche. Doesn’t run applications… now there’s an AppStore. Doesn’t run Flash… now there’s a Flash converter app. Apps don’t support a magazine subscription model… Tuesday they will. → Read More
Both the Justice Department and the FCC have approved Comcast’s monumental purchase of NBC Universal this morning. A cursory wade through the multiple press releases shows that the deal is full of conditions, as the FCC itself acknowledged that the merger could create threats to “to the development of innovative online video distribution services.” Yikes.
Of course this leaves people on all… → Read More
A cryptic Tweet from Boxee points to a new firmware version rolling out in the next few hours, one that probably promises Vudu and Hulu content on what Matt calls “his favorite box.” Matt here: Nevermind John. He meant to say Netflix, not Hulu. → Read More
Hulu CEO Jason Kilar made an appearance at the Samsung press event at CES today, where he announced that a Hulu Plus app will be coming to Android 2.2+ in the coming months. He demoed the app on a Samsung Galaxy S running Android 2.2. Unfortunately, there was no mention of the price of the app, nor if it will net you an extra subscription fee. I guess time will tell. [via Mobile Burn] → Read More
And there it is: Americans now spend as much time on the Internet as they do watching TV. So says a new study released by Forrester Research, which says that people now spend 121 percent more time online than they did only five years ago. What’s probably most significant is that these stats now include people in the 30+ age group; it’s not just college student insomniacs who spend their time… → Read More
Roku has released firmware update 2.9 which includes 1080p support in their XR devices. There are a few other bug fixes in the release including Hulu optimization for all devices. You can download it manually (“To do so please select “Settings” option from the homepage, then navigate to “Player Info” and finally choose “Check For Updates”. Your box will then prompt you with the… → Read More
Shares of Chinese video site Youku soared on its IPO today, closing at $33.44, which is 160 percent above its offering price of $12.80. Since Youku’s 15.8 million shares of American Depository Receipts (ADRs) represent 16 percent of the total shares, the closing price gives Beijing-based $Youku a market cap of roughly $3.3 billion. In other words, it is worth more than $AOL (owner of… → Read More
ESPN has just released a study that sheds some light on people’s cord cutting habits—or lack thereof. Using Nielsen data, ESPN has determined that a paltry 0.11 percent of U.S. households have dropped cable and/or satellite TV over the past three months. That rounds down to essentially nobody in my estimation. Even more interesting is exactly who these cord-cutters are, and they’re not who… → Read More
Almighty Giz has two exciting maps that offer an alternative explanation for the decline in cable and satellite subscriptions in the past year. If you look at the maps, you’ll find that the areas that saw the biggest drops in subscriptions are also, generally, the areas hardest hit by foreclosures. The theory goes, these areas have been hard hit by the recession, and subsequent unemployment, so… → Read More
Cord cutting: it’s real. That’s what a new SNL Kagan study suggests, and you have to figure that TV executives are freaking out. The numbers: 119,000 people “cut the cord” (read: dropped their cable or satellite TV) in the third quarter of this year. Meanwhile, in the third quarter of 2009, 360,000 people added cable or satellite TV service. Bottom line is, it would certainly appear that… → Read More
Today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and Peter Chernin sat down with New York Magazine’s John Heilemann to talk about the state of the video content business. A question from the audience asked Hastings about the news today that Hulu was cutting their prices.
Hastings noted that Hulu was still mainly an advertising play. And he said that Netflix has actually… → Read More
Hulu has formally launched its premium online video subscription service Hulu Plus after a preview period.
Pleasant surprise for those who are interested: the monthly subscription fee has dropped from $9.99 to $7.99, a 20 percent price cut.
Pleasant surprise for those who already signed up for Hulu Plus: early adopters will get a credit for the difference from the $9.99 preview price to be… → Read More
comScore’s monthly video data is out for October and it looks like Hulu saw a significant uptick in video ad impressions. Hulu saw 1.1 billion video ad impressions in October, compared to 793 million video ad impressions in September. This rapid growth in ad views is probably attributed an increase in viewership on Hulu thanks to the start of the Fall TV show season.
Tremor Media Video Network… → Read More
Here at the NewTeeVee conference in San Francisco, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar just dropped some interesting and some perviously unreported Hulu stats, including the fact that the ad and subscription supported service now has 30 million users monthly and estimates it will rake in $240 million dollars in 2010, up from a $108 million dollars in 2009.
Kilar also revealed that the service has 260 million… → Read More
Editor’s note: Mark Suster is a venture capitalist based in Los Angeles at GRP Partners. He blogs at BothSidesoftheTable.
The formation of Hulu was defensive – designed to stop another YouTube or Napster from emerging and causing disruption to the TV industry. The idea was that if you could put up a consumer site that was seen as the best place to consume content then people wouldn’t go to… → Read More
Sorry, folks. Someone clearly couldn’t keep their mouth shut and let it slip that Fancast.com was Google TV‘s backdoor to Hulu. The majority of the content no longer streams to Google TV units like it did just last week. NBC, ABC, Fox — it’s all blocked. Only Viacom’s content still works, but that’s too be expected considering the partnership between Google and the media conglomerate.
This is… → Read More
Heads up to you PS3 owners who didn’t want to pony up for PlayStation Plus. Hulu—yes, the subject of entirely too many word already today—will be soon available in Plus form (Hulu Plus, yes) to you. Dance in the streets, and so on. → Read More
Batten down the hatches, netizens! At a streaming media conference yesterday, Dish Network Vice-President of Online Content Development and Strategy, Bruce Eisen, said that sites like Hulu, which allow Internet users to watch certain television programming (and sometimes for free), may well destroy the television industry as we know it. That’s a bad thing if you’re Dish Network, but what if you’re… → Read More
“People like stumbling videos more than webpages,” StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp tells us in explaining why the service has decided to revamp their video offering, which they’re doing tonight. While you’ve been able to stumble through videos for a couple of years now, they’re finally making the experience more social. And they’re adding two big names to the arsenal: TED and Hulu.
Previously… → Read More
Yes, you heard this before. The Death of Cable TV. Yet, it hasn’t happened. But now, so many disruptions are happening in the video space, cable tv is really stepping towards the cliff. Don’t expect the cable industry to just give up.
We’ll get some new insights next week when the largest U.S. cable operator (23 million cable customers), Comcast, reports its Q3 earnings and subscriber count. … → Read More
The title of this post is both a very old idea and a very new one. With the prevalence of fiber connectivity and pervasive broadband speeds, this year has been a hot one for bringing together the home computer and the living room TV. While companies like Apple and Google battle over share of TV viewers, they have left open and promoted the web for content distributors to control their own… → Read More
By now you’ve probably seen the dark, amazing intro that renowned artist Banksy created for The Simpsons. And, in the process of looking for the video, there’s a decent chance you came across YouTube’s infamous screen stating that the content had been removed at the request of the copyright owner. In this case, it was apparently Fox, which would much rather you watch the content on Hulu —… → Read More
According to a Reuters report, Hulu is preparing to IPO in the first half of 2011. Sources told the news organization that Hulu will be looking to raise between $200 million and $300 million in a deal valuing the company at about $2 billion. Reports about Hulu’s IPO ambitions first surfaced last summer, but this may signal that a filing might be imminent.
Hulu is expected to file with the… → Read More
We had a feeling this was going to happen. It just felt right and sure enough, Roku just issued a press release confirming that Hulu will hit Roku players later this Fall. It will come in the form of Hulu Plus and carry the standard $9.99 per month subscription fee. Apple TV? Yeah, this is certainly a bit of an Apple TV buzzkill. It pretty much changes the entire landscape for media streamers. It… → Read More
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