What a huge day for the Walt Disney Company, as they have just bought into the website called Hulu.com. Not sure if you have been to this site, but it is quickly becoming one of my favorite sites. The Washington Post notes that Hulu is rapidly inching up on the number 2 video site on the web, and has been growing rapidly. It is interesting, because it is a site that has always had profitability as a major component. Rather than building the site for the consumer, and then figuring out a way to monetize it, Hulu sought to quickly build the best video player it could (satisfying the customer), providing great content (satisfying the customer), and providing an ad solution that has a very high success rate (satisfying the companies that advertise and the studios that own Hulu). So far, the sites investors include News Corp (Fox content), NBC and now Disney/ABC.
The Washington Post notes that Hulu may be on its way to becoming a dominant force in the video streaming realm, although it still has a ways to go to catch up with YouTube. The Post indicates "Hulu streamed an estimated 380 million videos in March in the U.S., compared to 5.9 billion for YouTube." Pretty hard to believe, but with word-of-mouth and excellent content, Hulu is on a good road. YouTube has had a hard time figuring out how to monetize their model, and has been trying to integrate paid content, ads and studio work to help pay for their enormous bandwidth and storage costs.
The Los Angeles Times states:
Disney will offer full-length episodes of its most popular prime-time shows from its ABC network, including "Lost," "Grey's Anatomy," and "Desperate Housewives," as well as such cable offerings such as ABC Family's "Secret Life of the American Teenager" and Disney Channel's "Wizards of Waverly Place." It will also provide older episodes from ABC's library, such as "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" and "Dancing with the Stars."
So, three cheers for Disney/ABC tonight on their latest investment. As a proud Disney stockholder, I think it's a great thing. I would love to see more Disney/ABC programming online. I don't often watch TV, since DisneyDean is always on the Internet :) - so this would be great for me to have on in the background. I know some of this content is already available from the Disney and/or ABC websites, but it would be available on a combined platform with a terrific video interface.
How about you? Do you think this is a great investment for Disney? Do you think there are other opportunities that Disney could explore instead? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments section!
For more information on this breaking news story, check out the following articles:
Washington Post
Los Angeles Times
Wall Street Journal
Financial Times
--- Disney Dean








Recent Comments