Hulu bolts the door to overseas visitors

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 07 May 2009 10:09

Your IT - Home IT

Hulu is a popular and 'official' site for catch-up TV. But it's just made life much more difficult for viewers outside the US.

With the backing of some big names in the TV industry (NBC Universal, News Corp, Disney), Hulu offers full episodes from a stack of popular shows including 24, 30 Rock, Bones, The Colbert Report, Family Guy, House, Prison Break, and The Simpsons.

The service has always been notionally restricted to users in the US, though Hulu's management claims to be working on the business and contractual issues necessary to serve a wider audience.

Business issues? Hulu is funded by advertisers who presumably (at least at this stage) are only interested in reaching a US audience. They'd only want to pay for ads shown to domestic viewers, or would scale back the rates they'd pay as the proportion of US viewers dropped.

The cost of running the service increases with the number of users, so Hulu doesn't want to serve people that advertisers aren't paying to reach.

(The odd thing is that Hulu advertisers appear to include international brands such as McDonalds.)

And rights to programs have traditionally been sold separately in different geographic areas. So just because Warner Bros (for example) has made a program, it may have already sold the Australian or UK rights to a broadcaster.

So what's changed? Find out on page 2.