Both the New York Times and The Economist recently published articles examining online video. Brian Stelter and Brad Stone in the NYTimes talked to the MPAA, Eric Garland of Big Champagne and the owner of the streaming site SuperNova Tube; the authors conclude that the pirates are “winning” the battle against the studios. The Economist instead looked at Hulu and declares it the winner over YouTube and Joost, feeling that Hulu proves the superiority of advertiser-supported in-browser streaming over download or separate application playback.
Janko at P2P-Blog has already pointed out that the NYTimes mistakenly placed TorrentFreak in Germany, not the correct Netherlands, but applauds Stelter and Stone for high-lighting the MPAA’s admission that lawsuits are not going to be a long term answer. And the reader comments very rightly point out that the figures cited by the studios are utterly meaningless – TV and films should probably be analyzed separately because of very different geographic and financial models of their distribution. The Economist instead looks beyond piracy for the most part, but does lump it into its criticism of Y0uTube as a visually confusing and unsavory place for professional content (read ad dollars) because of all the user-generated content.
A few points occur to me in reading both these articles back-to-back. Read the rest of this entry »
Well that Economist article was pretty useless honestly. Hulu is the winner and has shown the way? Hey, I like Hulu as much as the next guy, and I desperately want to find a way to get Hulu onto my TV in some reasonable fashion, but to assume they’re making money without doing any analysis… especially when others have done such and posted it, see for example:
http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/11/hulu-profitable-please
Now I don’t know if the Business Insider analysis is correct or not, but its a lot deeper than this guy was willing to go.