MattMaroon.com

I saw this article on NewTeeVee today contending that Hulu’s recent developments, like the Boxee removal I covered in my last post, might be driving customers back to piracy. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why piracy works so well for music, and why it is still a much smaller problem with TV shows than with songs for a number of reasons.

1. Most of the content (barring some HBO and Showtime stuff) is free anyway, and cable is incredibly convenient.

2. You don’t download a TV show once and then consume it over and over, like a CD. You have to get a new one every week (or in some cases, every day) and you watch it once and then delete it. The ratio of effort to reward is considerably higher. There are ways to do this reduce the effort a bit (such as RSS downloading) but they still suck because…

3. Getting the content digitized and put online is a much bigger hassle. With music, you pop a CD in and wait 3 minutes. eDonkey or whatever the kids use these days automatically starts sharing. With TV, you have to buy a tuner for your pc, hook that up to cable, record the program using some software (all of which sucks, and I’ve tried them all) edit out commercials, create a torrent file, etc.

4. The end result of pirating a video is generally a DivX file. The percentage of the population that knows what to do with one of those, let alone how to get it onto a television, is small and not growing quickly.

Anyone who downloads TV shows via RSS (as I do) knows that it’s highly unreliable. In fact, the pain of piracy often drives me to Hulu.

It’s also a mistake to assume that Hulu doesn’t want to end up on TVs because they don’t want to be featured in Boxee. Boxee still runs only on computers, and any computer with Boxee can run Hulu. Boxee right now isn’t a better way to get on televisions than the browser.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see TVs start shipping with built in Hulu support. Or given that Hulu is part-owned by NBC, a long time partner of Microsoft, it could easily end up on the Xbox 360. The Hulu guys aren’t stupid. They know that their future lies beyond just the PC. And they know that they exist only because of the legal advantage that allows them to be more convenient. They just want to ensure that when they get there, they do so on their terms, not a third party’s as happened to the music industry. They don’t want to escape the same piracy concerns dragging the record labels under just to end up a slaves to Apple, or more likely someone like Boxee.

Still, piracy is a non-factor to Hulu. Consider iTunes, which charges for music and has made inroads against widespread music piracy by offering convenience. The convenience Hulu offers, relative to pirating video, is ten times the amount iTunes does relative to pirating music, and Hulu doesn’t charge a cent. It’s pretty hard to make a case that any of their recent policies are going to change the overall direction online video is moving in.