No Hulu On Your HDTV
HULU got yanked off Boxee last week, and this week a great episode of TWIT discussed why. First, a primer:
With Boxee, you can hook up a mac or linux box to your HDTV and watch almost anything available on the internet on-demand on your nice big screen TV while using your remote and relaxing on your couch. While the geeks don’t talk about it enough, this switch from the experience of internet video on your laptop/desktop to internet video on your big HDTV is huge. Its cultural. And when you add HULU, arguably the most consistent higher quality free LEGAL content out there, it is quite hard to beat, if you dont mind the advertising.
But its over now. And it was the broken advertising/commercial business model built on controlling distribution that killed it.
For some reason, at some level, content producers make more money from advertisers if you get this stuff over broadcast or cable than if its streamed or downloaded over the internet. Most likely, its a function of CPM, where advertisers pay some amount for every thousand eyeballs, and the CPM is higher for broadcast & cable than for internet viewers, right now. So the content providers told HULU to tell Boxee that they are not allowed to pipe HULU through their application. They desperately want to prevent more people switching from watching their content over broadcast or cable to the internet, cause they’d make less money. And getting anything you wanted on-demand over the internet and onto your big screen HDTV, like Boxee+HULU supported, was a huge incentive to do so. They see putting their content on the internet and viewed on a desktop/laptop as an opportunity to add viewers, but viewing that same content distributed over the internet on your TV is understood as subtracting from the bottom line.
This is the convention wisdom on why HULU was forced to disconnect from Boxee, from the few of us who even think about this stuff. From a big picture perspective, this demonstrates how the big media companies are not too concerned about internet video on your desktop, but are scared sh*tless of the day that the internet makes open & independent HQ video a reality for most Americans on that big flat cultural icon in your living room. Big media has control of broadcast and cable, but the internet is truly an open media landscape. They don’t want folks even thinking about whats possible when you really bring the openness of the internet to television.
And it also points out how the business model is broken, how the incentives in the model fail those who are supposed to be at the center of the transaction, the creator and the fan. The people creating the content and the fans who love it are being shortchanged when advertisers have a voice in the creative decisions and when supporting the legacy big media distribution businesses prevent wider dissemination and enjoyment of the content. The creative teams want artistic freedom and to be fairly compensated while fans want great content at a fair price and to be able to experience it however they choose. We can do that.