As Comcast Deal Looms Is Hulu Living On Borrowed Time? - By: Paddy Chang

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As one of the biggest media deals ever inches ever closer to a conclusion, that being a merger of Comcast with NBC/Universal creating a company mainly controlled by Comcast. What happens to the currently free online tv service Hulu?
Add into the mix, the fact that whilst Hulu is second biggest online streaming site after You Tube it is expected to lose $33 million this year.

Comcast and NBC deal nears completion
Hulu has a catalogue of over 1700 TV shows and movies attracting around 40 million viewers-people who sit through a couple of commercials per show compared to eight or more on traditional TV in exchange for the luxury of being able to watch a show for free, just one day after it airs on network TV.
This free content idea that runs at a loss could well be coming to an end. NBC, Fox and ABC, the broadcasters that control Hulu, are mulling the idea of charging for at least some content. Hulu is expected to start testing subscription tiers for its programs in the new year.
So from all angles, the days of free tv via Hulu look to be numbered.

Hulu, never one to rest on its laurels has given its search feature a bit of a makeover. A new addition to the search and similar to umpteen other websites, is an Advanced Search feature, which gives a few extra filters you can use to drill down to exactly what your looking for.

Hulu newly added advanced search feature
Using the Advanced Search, viewers are able to search by a keyword or phrase, search within specific fields (such as show title, video title, etc.), or use common search operators like “and,” “or,” and “not.” While this all sounds complicated, in reality it just lets you search the Hulu ever growing database at a deeper level
Hulus blog reported the improvment:- “If you search for videos on Hulu often, we offer search operators that correspond with each of the fields in our Advanced Search menu, so you can type in a complete search query directly from the search bar. For instance, you can use the plus sign (‘+’) to add keywords to your search string. For example, +jim +pam +wedding calls up videos related to Jim and Pam’s wedding on The Office earlier this season.”
The Advanced Search feature can be found from any search results page on Hulu, or by clicking on the link at the bottom of the website.
This new feature follows on from Hulu adding a tagging feature last month and is one in a line of changes and improvments coming to the free tv website.

After the record viewing figures from Hulu for October, The BBC has revealed that its iPlayer service has had its best month since launch for October. The iPlayer showed a total of 79.3 million streams for the month from 1.1 million users.
The amount of daily requests for television and radio content which was average 2.6 million every day was also a new record. Of the 79.3 million requests, 53.2 million were for television content and 26.1 million was for radio content.
During October the iPlayer attracted an average of 1.1 million users, the highest figure on record. 700,000 requested TV content only, 300,000 radio content only, and 40,000 requesting both types of media.

iPlayer record month in October
The busiest time for the iPlayer were the last two weeks of October, partly attributed to the controversial appearance of the British National Party leader Nick Griffin on the political discussion show Question Time which saw a jump in traffic for that period. Apart from Question Time, popular shows were Strictly Come Dancing and Merlin
Watching TV on PC was still the primary use for iPlayer, representing 85% of requests. (The figures exclude the TV version of the iPlayer available on the Virgin Media cable network). The iPhone/iPod Touch and PS3 applications are still delivering significant numbers of TV requests at 7% and 6% respectively.
Catchup on demand tv made for the bulk of requests for October with only 4% of viewing was to live streams, though these services are relatively new for the BBC. The iPlayer is used roughly at the same time as watching traditional TV, but with more useage during the daytime and late at night.

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