Hulu Could Turn into a Paid Service. Will International Users Be Granted the Opportunity to Pay Now?

Surprise, Hulu owners have finally realized content is not really destined to be free and there could be people online willing to pay for quality and convenience. So they suggested that at some point in the future Hulu could turn into a paid service to add to the current ad-supported only model.

Disney’s Chief Executive Bob Iger (Disney now owns over 25% stake in Hulu) said that the online streaming site could one day start charging for the content that is now offered for free. This idea is based on the surveys that show that people are willing to spend money online: as much as $5 an hour to watch movies, 75 cents an hour for reading (be it books, magazines or newspapers), and 25 cents for every hour of internet use.

To me this sounds like quite an obvious decision as I have never supported the idea that everything that is available online should be free. To me as a web publisher this is quite obvious: many people work online creating the websites themselves and their content that other people enjoy and of course they expect some remuneration for their efforts. This remuneration should not necessarily be in the form of advertising revenue even though this is the most popular approach to monetizing websites so offering alternatives in the form of premium services and subscriptions have always seemed to be wiser to me than only ad-supported business model.

But for Hulu this may be something of a revolution because it is always way more difficult to make people pay for something that used to be totally free than to charge from the very beginning. Of course I’d expect some kind of revolt among Hulu users but this will also depend on how exactly this subscription is offered and also on the policies selected by various Hulu competitors.

Yet revolt or no revolt, I know one category of users (and a very broad one at that) who will only welcome the decision to let them pay for a subscription in exchange for content - if they are granted this opportunity at all. I am obviously talking about international users here. Hulu is only available to the internet users who visit the website from a US IP-address while everyone else will be able to browse the site but will not be able to watch any piece of content at all.

Of course for international users there has always been a possibility of using US IPs (easily available for purchase via Chinese IT professionals - they can hardly access anything at all other than Chinese resources without a proxy server). In fact, I do have a bunch of such IPs myself, they were purchased for me to be able to see what ads are displayed on Profy to the US visitors when I am not in the States myself.

And these very IPs I could easily use to access services like Hulu or Pandora which are only available to the US users because they are supported by advertisers who only want to target US users and also because there are too many issues with licensing content for international users. But I have never used the IPs to secretly get to the services where I don’t belong because they are not intended for the users outside of the US. Honestly, this looked to me very much like cheating and getting without invitation to a banquet only to eat and drink champagne for free without knowing the organizers at all.

Yet of course there are many users around the world who are much less oversensitive and using proxy to use the services not intended for them never seems to sound wrong to them at all. And I certainly don’t think these users are to blame for one simple reason: the owners of these websites don’t offer us any options at all with the obvious one being paying for the content we want with our money where the US users pay with watching ads.

Now that Hulu owners have finally realized that there could be another monetization road for the service involving users paying for the content instead of watching ads and consuming the content for free, I do hope that they will not forget those crowds of international users who have been willing to pay for the content for quite a while now - but have never been able to. And instead of only trying to persuade people in the US pay for what is available to them for free, they will settle the licensing issues and come up with payment options for the international users as well.