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The free video sharing website, Hulu, has prooved to be a big social media success. Hulu was launched just over a year ago, in August 2007. Neilson Online has reported that the website had over 142 streams in the month of September, it's highest numbers yet.
Hulu not only lets you watch free movies and tv shows, but also has kept up with Election 08' footage. Obama's acceptance speech and McCain's concession speech were posted immediately after the live delivery, courtesy of MSNBC. Hulu also provided much of the debates and other commentary in their coverage.
Hulu is supported by advertisements which media buyers are definitely paying attention to. Web TV Wire reports that currently 93% of Hulu users are content with the amount of advertising they see while using the website. This is good news for Hulu now, but the number of ads will surely continue to increase. I surely hope it's not a matter of time before ads take over this website, too.
Websites like Hulu are changing the way we watch entertainment. Along with other media devices such as digital video recorders, which allow us to record programs on television and watch them later, as well as give us the ability to fast forward through advertisements, social media is changing everything. You don't even need to own a television set to "watch tv" anymore. If you have a computer, a high speed Internet connection, and a good screen and speakers.. you are good to go.
I have to say that I absolutely love Hulu. It's great to be able to watch entire seasons of shows and movies that I haven't seen yet at no cost to me. The advertisements don't bother me at this point, but like I said earlier, I hope they don't increase too badly as the website begins to become more and more popular.
Do you think a website like Hulu can ever hit YouTube status?
2 comments:
I am not sure if Hulu would ever hit YouTube stats because it does not encompass the same range of video. While Youtube has everything from home videos to the presidential debates, Hulu is primarily primetime TV shows and movies.
That being said, the quality on Hulu is much better, and they have exclusive rights to air full episodes while Youtube videos are often broken into many segments, so if people catch on, their viewership can increase tenfold.
If Hulu is smart, it will start making sure to cover everything YouTube covers.
YouTube's monopoly on user-created content has yet to be seriously challenged and I'm interested to see where this will go.
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