HoogyWeb

Recently I saw a positive review of Hulu.com, the joint effort of media giants News Corp. and NBC Universal, which is currently in beta testing stages. With these two mega media giants come a wealth of network content, from NBC to Fox to Sci-Fi to FX and more. I decided to check it out, and while it took me over a month to be accepted into the beta program, it was worth the wait.

Hulu is a step in the right direction. It works by allowing members to view, watch and even share episodes online. Like the current broadcasting business model, they make their money solely on advertising. Ads run periodically in the timeline of every episode and cannot be paused or fast forwarded. The ads are brief and sparse, so the convenience tradeoff is small. Hulu is far from perfect, but it shows promise for the future of broadcasting.

They can take it further though. If you ask me, networks must devote themselves to a certain set of basic tenets in order to survive online:

End User Intuitiveness

Broadcasters should make the process of finding favorite shows as easy as looking through a cable channel guide or a TV guide magazine. More importantly, the process should be easier in the long run than outright theft. The best way to prevent piracy is to nullify it’s allure.

I like what Hulu has done in this regard, but they could go further by incorporating RSS feeds other notification methods to let viewers know when a new episode is available.

Cross-network uniformity

Internet Broadcasting SHOULD NOT BE PROPRIETARY! All television content should be available on the same medium, and the success or failure of programming should not be dictated by the accessibility of that medium, but by the quality of the shows provided. Networks should be working together to provide a single standardized protocol to make this happen rather than squabbling amongst themselves.

Hulu is a good step toward this, but it excludes a number of essential players. They should invite ABC and CBS to join in.

Openness to innovation

Rather than fighting Apple, Microsoft, Roxio, Lexmark, et al, content providers should be embracing them. They should open up their API to certain 3rd parties for the sake of promoting the new medium. I should be able to watch video on my AppleTV or iPod Touch, or for that matter any device with a screen and an active internet connection.

So far, to my knowledge, Hulu only supports internet playback on web browsers.

Lessons from the RIAA

Come to think of it, my wait for a free, Hulu-like service was actually a much longer than a month. Ever since the term “media convergence” saturated communications lingo in the late 90’s, I’ve anticipated a seamless TV/web union, but I felt let down in subsequent years. “Why is it taking so long?” I thought.

Perhaps the answer to the delay lies in the “status quo” attitude common to traditional big media providers. Likewise, the Television industry specifically may be learning from the mistakes made by other media industries of late.

Like the TV industry, record companies have had to come to terms with new tech, like it or not. The RIAA’s attitude in initially resisting new technology was based on valid concerns. With faster computers empowering the consumer to make perfect duplications of recordings, and with broadband allowing users to share bigger and bigger files, who was to stop file sharing from becoming an avenue for piracy? (Which is, of course, what happened.) Sadly, the industry response was reactive instead of proactive. They dragged their feet, lobbied, and sued offenders. Essentially, they fought innovation. But innovation is a stubborn bastard. It has a tendency to fight back… hard.

In the beginning, pirates were few and far between. A relatively small minority scattered about college campuses were responsible for the vast majority of music theft. There was a surplus of bandwidth, and a demand for content that could not (or would not) be legitimately supplied by the established industry. More and more “pirates” recognized this surplus and demand, and made content available to feed that appetite. Nowadays, who doesn’t have ill-gotten music somewhere their hard drives.

Record companies should have instead provided avenues for acquiring digital music cheaply, easily, and legally BEFORE the “free music” culture took hold. Imagine if iTunes had existed in 2000 alongside or even before Napster. The damage done is now irreparable. Consumers have acquired a taste for free music, and it is sweet and seductive. Any attempt to close one distribution channel is quickly rebutted with newer, better, more anonymous channels.

Fair Warning

Television broadcasters are fortunate. The greater amount of bandwidth required to pirate television has bought them some time. They’ve had opportunity to learn from the recording industries mistakes. Let’s hope they can set politics aside long enough to make internet broadcast television a viable and attractive option.