Film Futurist

Everyone was excited when Hulu first arrived on the scene in 2007, offering so many of us without cable or satellite subscriptions a chance to watch some of those network shows online for “free”. I certainly was happy to catch up on a great-looking 30 Rock the day after it aired on NBC on that cool interface Hulu is so well known for. And I’ve been enjoying many more shows since on Hulu for free. In the back of my mind I kind of knew that eventually something would have to give. How much could Hulu be making off the ad revenue on those pre/post-roll ads? (BTW, they have not released any figures so this remains a great mystery) From what I know about the massive infrastructure that creates these shows for traditional network release, I had a nagging feeling that Hulu-for-free wouldn’t last for ever.

Then of course, here we are three years later, and the news hit last week that Hulu was considering charging for some of its content. Hulu’s CEO Jason Kilar came right out in in a B&C interview and let everyone know that he is a real capitalist and was working furiously revenue-generating model. Good thing, because I was really worried that he was becoming a real red, and we’d all be in danger of being indoctrinated with Socialist dogma via Hulu. But seriously, this flag-carrying of capitalism says SOMETHING about the conundrum of funding the creation of commercial content. This business of free vs paid content is at its core a fundamental struggle in the entertainment industry with the idea of the web as a the hub of an experience that viewers are trained to think of as “free”. The truth is, we have come to see anything that comes through that broadband pipeline and onto our computer screens as a sort of right.

So I hate to say this, but when Hulu starts charging, I think piracy of these TV shows will become more common that it already is, just as we have seen happen in the music industry. As a content creator myself, I don’t support piracy but I just don’t think it’s reasonable to expect people accept that they HAVE to pay for content they are now used to getting for free. It’s anarchic, I know. But in the studios’ zeal to get into the business of making their content available online, they came up with a model that was at best, an interstitial one that Hulu was offering at the time. I’m definitely curious to know what this new model that Kilar and co have brewing at Hulu. But for now, I am left wondering what, if anything can save the TV/Film industry as we know it.

There is no doubt that the entertainment business as a whole is bloated and that huge parts of the machine which we invariably pay for when we do pay for content are grossly unnecessary. But that is I think, the by-product of a system in which the production of art (albeit popular), is pushed through an economic model essentially invented for the mass commercialization of goods and services. And this economic climate combined with technological changes of the information age that make it possible to transmit intellectual property freely is testing the bounds of that model. There is something about the hacking or hijacking of this model by vast numbers of the population (a segment one might not seriously consider to be criminal) that is testing this model of creating and distribution media art in this age.

We can invent new models within the existing system and try to figure out a way to save Hollywood and the entertainment infrastructure as it currently exists. But I have a feeling by the time this battle is over, we will likely have been forced to rethink the modes of production and the attendant profit-expectation the business is so well accustomed to.