Television and the Internet were destined for a merger. Today, we are still nowhere near that point but Hulu certainly has brought us a little closer. Hulu allows you to watch popular television shows and movies with limited commercial interruption. Hulu was started by NBC Universal and News Corp and launched in August of 2007. In two short years, Hulu has now entered the main stream and is finally reaching an audience that is beginning to impact a big industry.
The success of one venture sometimes means the inevitable failure of another. Time Warner, DirecTV and other companies are scrambling to not become the new members of an extinct club of companies that couldn’t adapt fast enough to the Internet. I certainly don’t feel bad for any of these companies though. They were in a prime position to move their content online and keep their customers within their service offerings. Not only should they have created websites for their customers to watch the programming they were already paying for. They also should have greatly expanded their on demand services so their customers could watch their favorite shows whenever they had the time.
The only thing that might save these companies is gaining exclusive rights to the content before it is allowed on websites like Hulu. The cable companies need to be the movie theaters before the movie is released to DVD. If they aren’t successful in this endeavor then they will lose their customers as well as their jobs. I know I wouldn’t pay for cable when I can get a high speed Internet connection from many different companies and then I could gain access to the latest episode of Lost the day after it was released. I don’t know what my breaking point would be but I am not sure if I could wait more than a week to watch Lost. There are shows that I would wait for if it meant not paying $80 per month though.
I personally feel that the media companies will cave to the cable providers because the amount of money that they are paid for the rights to their content. The cable companies will still need to provide much more convenient methods of viewing the exclusive content because there will be many people that are very willing to wait a couple of weeks or even months to watch their favorite shows. If the cable companies aren’t successful with this type of model, they are toast. They need to gain limited time exclusivity or they will only be around for a limited time.
