CBS is the last man standing against Hulu
By Tim Conneally | Published July 6, 2009, 3:15 PM
Today marks the beginning of ABC's arrival on Hulu. Last April, Disney's ABC Enterprises jumped aboard NBC Universal and News Corp's increasingly popular video syndication site, and this morning, the first ABC program was rolled out for streaming.
The first ABC show available on Hulu is the drama "Grey's Anatomy," of which five episodes have been posted. For the next two weeks, more content will be added, including episodes of the network's biggest hits like "Desperate Housewives" and "Scrubs." A month before Disney and ABC arrived at a deal with Hulu, the network agreed to first bring its content to YouTube, where it would supply clips of popular shows and short-form episodic content equipped with "different monetization options" than standard YouTube videos.
Hulu, which is accepted as a higher value site for professional content, now has a the lion's share of network support with content coming from NBC, Fox, ABC, and their subsidiaries, while CBS and The CW content is syndicated on CBS-owned TV.com. Though TV.com has posted significant gains in unique views and minute-by-minute engagement for five months straight, according to Nielsen Videocensus, CBS remains the last network standing unaffiliated with Hulu.
Additionally, erstwhile competitor Joost went through several format revisions before the death knell began to sound for that service last week.
This just foreshadows the day when ISPs will start charging by the Gigabyte; or establish a cap, over which they start charging by the GB or MB.
Their justification? "All those streaming TV show videos are using so much bandwidth, it will bring the Internet to a crawl if something isn't done. We need more nodes and monitoring equipment to effectively manage all that demand. These cost money."
It's all BS, of course. But this is how they will plead their case. and the FCC, after making mock objections for several months to save face, will eventually just say, "Oh - all right."
And the TV networks will make the same deals with the ISPs that they made with the rebroadcasters ( a cut of every dollar charged)to get back the cash cow they lost from people cancelling cable and the other rebroadcasting services, to watch TV on the Internet.
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|**** hulu since it stopped working wit the ps3
Score: -1
|Hulu rocks, more power to HTPC's!
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