Disney Comes to Hulu
This morning, Hulu and Disney announced that Disney will join NBC Universal, News Corp., and Providence Equity Partners as a joint venture partner and equity holder of Hulu. Thanks to this, Hulu will now be able to feature shows from ABC's prime-time lineup like "Lost," "Grey's Anatomy," and "Private Practice," as well as shows from ABC Daytime and SOAPnet. Hulu will also now feature a select number of programs from the Disney Channel and library titles from Disney.
We heard a number of rumors about this deal in the last few days, so this announcement doesn't come as a great surprise. Neither Hulu nor Disney disclosed the financial terms of the arrangement, but according to most reports, Disney will take a 30% stake in the joint venture. Disney will also get three seats on the Hulu board.
Hulu = Online TV?
Hulu was already on the brink of becoming the de facto standard for watching TV shows online, and adding Disney to its line-up only consolidates this position. Advertisers have been flocking to Hulu, and while it is getting some serious competition from TV.com, which is owned by CBS (which doesn't have a deal with Hulu), this new deal should give it a nice boost in the next few months.
It should be noted that ABC's own online player features 720p HD versions of all its major prime-time shows, something that Hulu currently doesn't offer, so to get the best quality, users will still have to go to ABC.com.
CC-licensed image used courtesy of Flickr user Raymond Brown.
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This will likely become the norm as the technology is implemented to provide more high speed capability to the net and to users. Eventually we will probably watch all our TV and Movies on the web and PC. Won't even need a television or the TV will morph into a computer.
I hope Hulu becomes the norm. My computer is my preferred method for everything, from filing (I scan all docs) to watching TV. But how are the cable companies going to respond to something that could cut into their profits? With Comcast and Time Warner trying to find ways to charge more for internet service, I hope Hulu will lead the way in fighting the cable behemoths and keep internet access as open and free as it was meant to be.
This is great news. We switched to 100% online television watching a year ago and have never looked back.
You say that advertisers are flocking to Hulu, but I have been very concerned lately because it seems like about 90% of the ads are for non-profits, who usually get ad time only when the network cannot fill the time with paid ads. Anyone heard about this trend?
Thanks.
This is great news. Just this past weekend I e-mail ABC berating them for using a custom plug-in instead of Flash to stream their shows on their site. I'd been linked from Hulu.com to ABC.com to view episodes of Castle, only to find that I couldn't watch them since I was using Ubuntu Linux.
Their canned reply e-mail was no help, let me tell you.
Looking forward to watching Lost, Castle, et. al. without having to boot into Vista.