How does Hulu do it?
 

I'm really curious - how does hulu manage to keep up without running out of money? They're able to pull together vast quantities of entertaining programming from a number of different networks. Advertisements are quick and infrequent, if present at all. Though the userbase is growing daily, the shows still load quickly enough where my own computer's capability is the only thing holding me back.

How does Hulu do it?
Do you think they'll be able to keep it up?
What are the inefficiencies in traditional television that inhibit this freedom from long commercial breaks?

I'm pretty certain that while they pay to have the movies and shows on their they get a percentage of money back based on the number of views..

can they keep it up? yeah until something better comes along..something that doesn't have shitty movies.

Hulu is co-owned by Newscorp (i.e. Fox), NBC and Disney (i.e. ABC, Disney, Pixar, etc.).

As such, they don't need to pay to license content. They just share in the profits. The ad dollars for online are actually doing well. It's ad revenue on their free-to-air operations that are suffering losses.

I just heard on NPR this morning they some times charge twice as much or more for advertising than TV. The average for TV ad is 25 dollars per 1000 viewers whereas Hulu charge somewhere between 40-60 dollars.

I can see why, it's way more effective.

I keep seeming the "anyone craving some juniper, blah blah.. " commercial for some gin and it's starting to work on me. The coolest thing is you can click any Hulu ad and it takes you to the website for that product.

Yes but how do sites such as this do it then? They used to be very good before they became a sea of dead links.

I am totally diggin icefilms but they also have ads that run before the show begins. So how do hosting sites make it because icefilms doesn't have a lot of ads running and I never notice the ads anyway.

Yeah, it's more effective than TV advertising because there's only one versus a shit load on TV. So you're more prone to stay and view the entire thing on your computer rather than going somewhere then come back to the TV. Devil bastards.

Those are run mostly by independent fans of masses, not anything really resembling a company or corporation.

I think those type of sites, along with alluc.org, depend on fan support, savvy people who can find those hidden show links, anonymous uploaders, re-direct links, and absolutely no on-site hosting of the streaming videos to be able to stay afloat for awhile, while over time, the popularity and word-of-mouth gets out enough that the site receives more traffic each coming month.

With that, you also get a small percentage of generous and appreciative users who are willing to ship off $5 bucks a month towards donations and site costs, and the video site can stay online indefinitely, save for when a DMCA officer is called in to investigate.