Agora Media Group Innovation Blog

The British Press is reporting that Hulu is giving up on the UK after months of fruitless dialogue with all the major UK broadcasters. What works smoothly in the US does not seem to cross the pond all that well with, what appears to be,  a lot of effort, but a little too late.

UK broadcasters such as ITV, Sky, Channel 4, and Five are all working on their own  catch-up technology or are already well into talks with other parties.

“…Channel 4 and Five have already signed third party deals with YouTube and SeeSaw and ITV isn’t playing ball,” states the Daily Telegraph technology report.

Ben McOwen Wilson, ITV’s director of online and interactive added in the article,

“Hulu is a major success in the US but the UK TV market is a different place. It is much more consolidated, which mean there are fewer online locations than in the US, which users need to visit to get access to their favourite content – therefore there is less need for aggregators.”

Hulu, as Gianluigi reported earlier this week, is rumoured to be putting in a subscription service into place soon in the US market.

“Ultimately, Hulu is expected to adopt the same commercial loads as network television.”

Network TV in the USA is horrifically unwatchable with broadcast stations allocating 16 to 21 minutes per hour to commercials. The model of driving people to subscription with interuption TV online might work – but will web viewers take it?  This model would certainly never work in Europe.

Somehow it feels like going backwards to adopt methodology from the old school broadcast world – they would have to be a lot more creative in converting European viewers who are used to watching reruns of Oprah with few interuptions and sans commercials every seven minutes on their normal TV – as they cut out most of the commercials.