Hulu in talks to come to the UK and iPlayer to go abroad (at a price)

Written on 20th March 2009                                                                                                              6 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.

Popular Video on Demand site Hulu and the company behind it NBC/News Corp are in talks with “all the partners you’d expect” to bring Hulu to the UK.

In an interview with PaidContent, NBCU International President said

The UK is more complicated than anywhere else to have this dialogue at the moment – we just had the Kangaroo dialogue, now Canvas, and a whole set of political issues which make conversation slow. But still keen, the guys are really keen.”

The Kangaroo dialogue was an inquiry by the Competition Commission that was preventing a company called Kangaroo, an iTV project, from launching a similar service in the UK in collaboration with other major TV networks. The outcome has however has not been positive for the companies involved as the Competition Commission put a stop to the Kangaroo project.

This is however good news for Hulu in some respects as it leaves a strong market opportunity open to being targeted.

iPlayer International

Hulu aren’t the open only video on demand company looking to expand growth abroad. During the MediaGuardian Changing Media Summit, BBC’s Director General Mark Thompson said the BBC is now

“talking to all the public service broadcasters and others about the practicalities of sharing the iPlayer.”

Chris Dobson, BBC Worldwide ad sales director told the conference:

A sort of iPlayer-like device that was made available outside the UK might well have to have a subscription feature to it in order to make the economics work.”

So a pay for “iPlayer International” is on the cards and there’s even stronger potential of a Hulu UK too. Unfortunately it does seem some time away and there are likely to be costs involved for the consumer – aside from advertising – particular for the iPlayer.

Would you pay a subscription for either?

bbc, hulu, iplayer, nbc universal

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Some media companies finally get it and profit from illegal YouTube movies

Written on 18th August 2008                                                                                                              2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

“For the most part, people who are uploading videos are fans of our movies. They’re not trying to be evil pirates, and they’re not trying to get revenue from it.”

There you go! See? It isn’t that hard to say goodbye to that negative “the digital revolution is gonna kill us” attitude. The man who said the above words to The New York Times really gets it: Curt Marvis, the president of digital media at Lionsgate Entertainment. His company doesn’t remove illegal YouTube movies, but prefers to profit from it. YouTube offers them the possibility to profit from the advertisements on the video page and shows a little banner, saying Lionsgate Entertainment owns the movie.

Indirect profit

CBS, Universal Music, Electronic Arts and some other participating companies won’t make millions of dollars from this unconventional advertising program. Since the ads only appear on a fraction of all the YouTube videos and most of them hardly track a hundred views. But it’s not so much about direct profit here, but more about indirect profit.

With the media companies allowing mash-ups of content they own the copyright of, fan subcultures can flourish. Every YouTube user can create his own trailer of his favorite movie or give the storyline a twist. Some become real hits. So while the media companies are making a few pennies from the ads directly, they indirectly boost sales via web hypes.

Not everybody is convinced

Not all of world’s media giants are convinced by YouTube. Time Warner and Murdoch’s News Corporation are willing, since they acknowledge testing the new advertisement model, but still a bit afraid. Disney and NBC Universal prefer to see visitors of illegal movie pages automatically forward to their own videos.

But the worst and most old-fashioned of all is Viacom. They’re still busy lining up the 1 billion dollars copyright infringement case against YouTube. If the company wins, the billion dollars might compensate some of Viacom’s losses on sales. But what about the future? How will they boost sales in five years? They’d better start to get used to the new age and profit from it, just like some of their competitors do.

cbs, disney, electronic arts, lionsgate, nbc universal, news corporation, time warner, Viacom, youtube

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