So here it is the year 2011 and I have only logged on to the Hulu website once before today. Why? For starters, this MBA thing has kind of consumed all of my time for the past 3 years (not to mention my day job and 3 kids). My problem is simple, that thing called time. The only thing I watch on TV these days is sports and an occasional tv show at 11pm or so...and I just watch whatever happens to be on at that time.
A stat that I thought was truly amazing from the case..."while the average American web user spent about ten minutes a day viewing online video, they watched live television for about 300 minutes."
300 minutes a day? Excuse my french, but who in the hell has time to watch 5 hours of tv a day?!?! I need their job.
But what is Hulu's value proposition and why should I care? Hulu's mission is to "help users find and enjoy the world's premium, professionally produced content when, where and how they want it." Let me add one point to that mission (even though price should not be a part of their mission)...they are doing all of this while making it FREE to the user. There is your value proposition to the user. All of this original, professionally produced content is being delivered to the user absolutely FREE of charge. Of course, Hulu has since added a "Hulu Plus" option to provide this content to you on a variety of devices for $7.95/month, but at some point in time, I wouldn't be surprised to see Hulu Plus become free as well.
How does Hulu differ from traditional broadcast and cable operators? Did I mention this content is delivered to the consumer FREE? There ya go, there is one of your differentiating factors. Hulu also provides mechanisms to increase personalization options to increase the user experience. Hulu allows users to "manage their viewing experience, for instance by maintaining a video queue and adding videos to it for future viewing, by participating in Hulu's discussion boards and rating and reviewing videos, and by sharing interests with other users."
In my opinion, this "TV Everywhere" creation developed by Comcast and Time Warner will compete somewhat with Hulu, but the difference...this service is not FREE. You must be a subscriber in order to get this content.
Here's an interesting debate...many households now forego land line service for telephones in favor of cell phones; will the same be said for households foregoing traditional tv's (and cable service for that matter) in favor of internet tv? Only time will tell, stay tuned...
Yes Dennis Leary, I'm adding this entertaining commercial to my bliggity blog, just for you.
Thanks for the feedback Murph, sounds like we are in similar situations...and clearly not their target market. I also found the "300 minutes" stat nothing short of mind blowing and look forward to seeing how this all plays out, ie. your cell phone example and replacing traditional tv's.
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