This is one of those Cinema Static Pragmatic Observations on Hulu’s Television Bracket contest that I’ve been writing about of recent weeks.
While watching the Hulu Television brackets is fun, seeing how other shows are valued against each other isn’t all cheery fun. I’m suspicious there’s an underlying business factor motivating this process. I haven’t seen numbers on how many people are voting, but I presume there should be plenty of people tossing their votes into the effort to make this a rather decent vote count.
But this Hulu brackets thing worries me.
The last time I was part of a massive voting process, it was some years back when the cable companies were asking us what our favorite cable channels were. Within the year of that “survey”, we were paying more for special channel tiers. The tiers were made up of the channels that won the votes.
Since Hulu is run by NBC Universal, Fox Entertainment Group & ABC, this competition, in the long run, is going to tell them an awful lot about the value of these shows. I wonder what they’ll do to the winning franchises?
My first guess… judging from my experience, is that we may start seeing the first pay-for-view television content on Hulu. Being as how Hulu is looking to finally start making money off their online content.
Or, as News Corp’s Deputy Chairman Chase Carey has said,
It’s time to start getting paid for broadcast content online. I think a free model is a very difficult way to capture the value of our content. I think what we need to do is deliver that content to consumers in a way where they will appreciate the value. Hulu concurs with that, it needs to evolve to have a meaningful subscription model as part of its business
Once Hulu determines what we value, like say, with a brackets voting test, well, you do the math! Me, I’ll figure out some way to rebel! Maybe I’ll go back to reading books! Not!
[Gizmodo, Broadcasting & Cable]
