Hulu has been turning a profit for the last two quarters, but that hasn’t made life for the online television aggregate any easier. If anything, it only complicates Hulu’s operations further.
It is coming under increasing pressure from the companies that supply its content. They want Hulu to earn more advertising dollars and set up a subscription service, asking consumers to pay a monthly fee to watch at least some of the shows on the site. … Hulu’s 200 content suppliers, some big and some small, receive 50 to 70 percent of the advertising revenue Hulu generates from their videos. Some of the media companies complain privately about the paltry checks they have received through these deals, even as use of the site has grown. … One major supplier, Viacom, withdrew its programming from the site after failing to reach a deal on revenue sharing, depriving Hulu visitors of popular Comedy Central shows like “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report.”
An anonymous source inside Hulu even goes so far as to compare navigating the media landscape to passing health care reform. So before this is all over, Hulu will cave to a lot of unreasonable demands, eventually offering a watered down service that pisses off old people who don’t know how to quote “Download the Google”?
