Hulu Should Make You Rethink Your Television Ad Budget
OK so this is only marginally real estate related… but I got my Beta invite from Hulu.com over the weekend and I have to say I am pretty impressed.
For those of you who didn’t know, Hulu is a joint effort by NBC/Universal and Fox to bring TV to the web. Major media have been much ridiculed for their “heads-in-the-sand” approach to Web 2.0; but I gotta say, this is legit.
It’s high quality video, extremely usable and feature rich. I could actually even see myself giving up my monthly cable bill for Hulu’s on-demand approach someday.
I’ve embedded a test clip below to you give you a sense of how it looks.
Pretty cool. And I’m going to do my best to put a real estate marketing spin on this.
Hulu is a heads up to the very near future where cable’s stranglehold on the delivery on video programming fractures for good (thank God). On demand video delivered over the Internet will eventually completely supplement the traditional scheduled television experience, all except for live events like news and sports anyway.
An on demand world does have implications for a real estate marketing budgets, or at the very least for the big brands anyway. But far from it being the extinction of TV advertising - it’s just the traditional 30 second spot that’s about to become the dinosaur.
Sponsored content, pop-up interstitials and branded content (when the sponsor itself is embedded in the program) are the most likely directions the industry is heading. And the best thing is that real estate offers so many obvious opportunities for content and much of it is “evergreen” in nature; take a local program like Chicagoland’s HomesPlus, for example.
As a real estate brand, aligning yourself with a producer (or even producing it yourself) and distributing a show over the ‘Net is about to become even easier to do. Sites like Hulu are building the infrastructure. Consumers are shifting their consumption patterns. Just give it a little more time.
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John Schroeder | Dec 17, 2007 | Reply
I got my Hulu beta invite as well and all I can say is…WOW!!!
Now this is internet video!
People’s expectation of online video is going to go up significantly.
Matt Collinge - the 604homesguy | Dec 17, 2007 | Reply
I couldn’t watch the video because the “content is not currently available in your country or region.” hmmm.
Joel Burslem | Dec 18, 2007 | Reply
@Matt - I take it from your handle ‘604homesguy’, you’re in Vancouver, Canada. Unfortunately, Hulu is only available to US residents for now.
Stacey Freidman | Dec 20, 2007 | Reply
I’m in the US and I received the same “content is currently not available” message.
Brian Requarth | Dec 20, 2007 | Reply
Hi, I am currently in Bogotá, Colombia and obviously if it is not available in Canada it is not available here. Joel, my question is why would they limit it to the US? Isn’t it the Internet?
Joel Burslem | Dec 20, 2007 | Reply
@Brian - Limited to the US because the networks don’t want to eat into their syndication revenue. Foreign sales of TV programming is very lucrative.
I agree with you though - it’s a shortsighted approach. I’d be off to BitTorrent instead.