Hulu Announcement. The biggest OTT news is that Hulu just announced that they are putting together an OTT skinny bundle package. It’s not expected to launch until next year, but Hulu has already struck deals with Disney and Fox, which happen to be two of its corporate parents. The Hulu package is interesting because this really represents the major programmers taking a shot at stealing customers away from their cable company customers.
Hulu’s history is pretty interesting in that their owners – Disney, Fox and NBC Universal (Comcast) – were very careful in the early days to not give Hulu great content that would upset the cable companies. But that seems to have changed. Hulu is now getting access to many more movies and other content and is making a major run at Netflix. Since it’s owned by programmers who themselves have a lot of content, Hulu certainly has a chance to eventually become the dominant OTT player. I’m seeing a lot of web articles talking about how Netflix is losing their sheen as their content choices dwindle.
YouTube Unplugged. After having this on the shelf for the last four years it looks like Google and YouTube are finally getting serious about launching a skinny bundle of their own. They are in talks with the major programmers and are talking about launching early next year.
YouTube already launched the YouTube Red subscription service last fall that bundles together the premium content found only on YouTube. It’s aimed at younger viewers who seem to prefer YouTube as a source of video content. The cable companies are going to have to start sweating with Hulu and YouTube both making a major play to attract people away from traditional cable packages.
CBS and Star Trek. CBS has announced that after it airs the first episode of its new Star Trek series on TV that all future episodes will be available only on the online CBS All Access Platform. This is a major play to sell more subscriptions to that service. Considering the strong draw of Star Trek it might work. But CBS is not going to dump the whole series on line at once for binge viewing but will feed a new episode each week.
FilmStruck. Criterion and Turner have announced the creation of a new online movie service they are calling FilmStruck. The service will have the largest catalog of older movies online and includes the whole MGM and RKO movie catalogs which Ted Turner bought in the 80s. This gives the service a significant share of the movies on most of the lists of all-time greatest movies. The catalogs also contain mountains of movies that have not been available for years. As part of this deal Criterion will be pulling about 500 old movies from Hulu.
Netflix Survey. A survey of Netflix customers showed that 76% of them believe that Netflix and other online content is going to eventually completely displace traditional cable TV. Of the 24% who didn’t think this was so, the primary reason they thought cable would survive is news programming. Interestingly, 68% of those surveyed did not think that Netflix would replace movie theaters.