On May 1, 2016, Hulu
announced
a new service aimed at cord-cutters. The unnamed subscription service would
stream feeds of popular broadcasts and pay-TV channels, making the company a competitor
to traditional pay-TV providers. Walt Disney Co. and 21st Century
Fox, co-owners of Hulu, are working on agreements to license many of their
channels for the platform. Comcast Corporation, another co-owner of Hulu, has
yet to announce if it will participate in the service with its NBC programming.
Pay-TV
providers are developing streaming services to increase their number of consumers.
Dish Networks, Comcast, and AT&T-DIRECTV all offer curated streaming
programs. Because one-in-seven
Americans are “cord-cutters,” meaning they no longer have a traditional pay-TV
subscription, online offerings allow pay-TV providers to gain back some of
their former subscribers.
Hulu’s new service
is not an attempt to regain former subscribers. Instead, it hopes to grab cord-cutters
from the entire video marketplace. Hulu’s service could become the standard for
streaming live television because it would not require a specific Internet
service provider, and because it could pull programming from three of the biggest content
companies - Disney, Fox, and NBC.
This transition
from pay-TV to streaming services within the video marketplace is a response to
the increasing number of cord-cutters. There is no doubt that the video market
is moving online, but the FCC recently
proposed to lock in old technology and add unnecessary regulations to
set-top boxes. These regulations would not only create costs that could stifle
this innovative transition, but they would allow 3rd parties to reap
the benefits of content creators’ intellectual property rights.
See our infographic
on the FCC’s proposal and our comments
submitted to the FCC regarding expanding consumers’ video navigation choices and
commercial availability of navigation devices.
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