Hulu is rolling backwards
More and more old episodes seem to being removed from Hulu. It used to be that for many shows, you could find all the old episodes, but recently its seemed that you can only find some from the current season. For instance, as of this writing, you can currently only watch five episodes of The Office.
I’m not privy to the inner workings of Hulu, but from the outside it seems like the Old Media content owners are trying to push Hulu to be more like, well, TV - by forcing you to watch episodes on their timeline. Yes, it’s not as restrictive as having to tune in the same time each week, but now you have to log on before they remove the episodes.
Don’t these guys ever learn? TV on the internet is simply not the same as cable or broadcast TV. I’m willing to give up the bigger screen and higher quality to watch it on my monitor precisely because I can catch up on old episodes and I can watch it anytime.
It seems similar to what happened to “It’s Always Sunny in Phildephia” - the show was a breakout hit on Hulu (much more popular than it was on TV). If I remember correctly, all (or nearly all) of the episodes were online. As it started getting more popular, the studio started restricting the license (so now there are only five episodes) and tried to put it back on TV. It’s it possible (likely even) that the people who enjoy “Sunny” are not big TV watchers? Why not let the show thrive on the medium in which it became popular in the first place?
The five episodes restriction is typical Old Media. They knew how to make a buck with the old model, so now we’re going to have to pry open their cold, dead hands in order to give them money with the new model. I’m positive there is gobs of money to be made with TV over the internet, but it’s definitely not going to happen by trying to make it just like a crappier version of cable.
Contrary to their expectations, the five episode restriction doesn’t make me want to watch soon after the episode airs - it makes me not want to watch at all. There are shows online that I won’t watch on Hulu because they don’t have the early episodes, so I won’t know what’s going on.
Even for a show that I’m willing to watch on Hulu, the restrictions mean they’re losing money -how much ad money are they making from all those old episodes they aren’t hosting? Yep, zero.
I really like where Hulu was going, but it seems the content owners are determined to ruin the one positive step forward they’ve taken in recent years.
Luckily, there is always Netflix.
