Of course not more than a week after I praise Hulu on this very blog, the overlords of Hulu at News Corp have forced me to eat my words. According to News Corp’s Chase Carey:
It’s time to start getting paid for broadcast content online.
Greg Sandoval (writer of the original article that intrigued me) has an interview today with Eric Garland, who is an expert in online piracy. According to him:
What you have is a very effective antipiracy tool in Hulu, and I’m specifically drawing on the numbers and not just citing anecdotal evidence. People really do prefer the Hulu experience. So you actually have cannibalization, for once, of a pirate market by a legitimate market. You have a legitimate market stealing share and audience away from a pirate market. Put that behind a subscription wall and they’ll just go back.
Not only does the paywall sound shortsighted and poorly thought out, but charging for content flies in the face of what these companies have done for decades. It’s only recently that they’ve been able to make significant amounts of money on home video sales. For most of their history, they’ve made their money selling advertising on free content – the model that Hulu follows today.
We already went through this with the music industry, do we really need to go through this again? Your sales are slowing… so you have to blame the customer? What business on earth has ever managed to survive on a strategy like that?
Sandoval cites Surfthechannel as an example of one of the sources for pirated content that viewers are flocking to. I heard about the site a few months ago, and managed to get really excited for all of 5 minutes. The breadth of content available is fantastic, but when I tried to watch something, I got redirected to a website that threw up pop-up ads. The video quality was sub-par at best, and the audio not syncing correctly with the video made it damn near unwatchable.
Watching something on Hulu, by comparison, is better and easier than watching the same thing on television. Its success has shown that people will choose legitimate ways of obtaining content if it provides the level of consumer experience that they are expecting.
So instead of blaming your customers, why not just give them what they want?
There was an interesting project brought up on the most recent episode of This Week in Google (one of the more headier technology podcasts that I listen to) – it’s called Picture the Impossible, an alternate reality game (ARG) developed by students at the Rochester Institute of Technology and run in conjunction with the local newspaper.
I’ve written before about how newspapers really need to innovate in order to survive, so it’s really fascinating to see a project that takes traditional media into a space (interactive gaming) that you absolutely would not expect. In some ways, however, it really isn’t such a bizarre move. Newspapers have traditionally had readers who read mainly for the puzzles inside – my wife occasionally picks up the free paper just for the crossword.
Additionally, the ARG involves games, trivia and scavenger hunts that require knowledge of the local history of Rochester. This takes advantage of the newspaper’s core competencies of both generating local content and maintaining an archive of local content. In a way, it almost mirrors the “locavore” trend, where foodie/environmentalists only eat food grown within a certain distance from where they live.
This goes in direct opposition to what newspapers have been doing, which is to increasingly source content from international agencies like the AP or CNN. I suppose the assumption is that buying news is cheaper than hiring someone to go out and report on it. The new demands on media won’t let local newspapers get away with this anymore. If I want national press coverage, I won’t go to my local paper (or it’s website), I’ll just go to Google News.
In the future, I don’t think I’ll be opening the paper everyday and see an ARG game. It is, however, a worthwhile experiment, and it’s good to see old media trying out something new.
Despite all the pontification about how learning online is “THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION,” this SNL sketch (as well as the comments section on any article regarding online education) certainly points to a continuing belief that anything short of a face-to-face education is somehow second-rate.
This is rather curious, seeing as the University of Phoenix (the logo of which is spoofed in the sketch) is the largest institution of higher education in the U.S. by enrollment. Add to that Kaplan University’s brilliant ad campaign arguing for education on-demand and the popularity of the state-supported, entirely online Western Governors University.
I bring this up mainly to compare it with my own recent experience at a large public university. The mix of classes between online and face-to-face was roughly 50/50, and I honestly wouldn’t give an edge to one or the other. This despite the pretty obvious bias I have favoring the online side (given both my academic concentration and the content of this blog).
I’ve never taken a class at an entirely online university, but I highly doubt this fact is necessarily an indicator of quality. Many state schools even tout the fact that they have entire academic programs online to appeal to those who live too far to commute to campus.
The thing about the SNL sketch that really caught my eye was the bit about them sending your diploma via email. A few days after my graduation this summer, I got an email with a link to a website where I could see my diploma in a choice of lovely yet ridiculously overpriced frames. Of course, the company that made this website used a CSS trick to try and keep me from downloading it.
I’d rather have the printable diploma, but I guess I should just be happy they made the university font legible. Thanks University of Mumblemumble!
Greg Sandoval of CNET has an interesting 