Here's Money: Entertain Me!

Grim rumor via Cinematical holds that Hulu, our favorite place to watch TV shows online for free, may begin charging for said TV-show-viewage in the future. Maybe as soon as next year.

If you read the linked story, it isn't clear that there would actually be fees for all content on the site, so maybe some shows/episodes would still be free while others would have a cost.

While the natural response to hearing you have to pay for something that used to be free is protests and screaming (fun, too!), I'm actually withholding judgement on this until details are available. Because depending on how much it cost, I might be quite willing to pay to watch a show online.

Say there's something that runs on a channel I don't get. We'll use the example of Battlestar Galactica. 

While it was on, BSG ran free on Hulu on a weeklong delay (each episode became available online a week after it aired, so if you watched only on Hulu you were always a week behind and had to carefully guard yourself against exposure to spoilers). It was a fair deal and I was happy to get it, but I have to say that if I could have paid a couple of bucks to watch each week's episode immediately, rather than wait a week to see it free, I probably would have done it.

Also, I know someone who watched the first seasons on DVD as the last season was starting, and then couldn't follow the last one with us, because only the most recent few episodes were available at any particular time, so you couldn't start from the beginning. She totally would have paid (if it weren't too much) to get caught up so we all could have discussed plot twists in glorious and geeky fashion.

I imagine (perhaps over-optimistically) that this new situation, if it encourages even greater participation in Hulu (which does not actually have every single show out there right now, ahem) might help with an issue that I personally am bitter about: the fact that you can't order cable channels a la carte. 

I really only want about four of them, but you can't get them that way, you have to pay a large amount of money for a large package of channels, most of which you don't care about (the Big Deal of television subscriptions). In my home, we basically decline to pay a lot of money for cable, so we get basically no channels. It's the choice we've made, and we live with it, but we still complain, because darn it, we can imagine a better world, and why aren't we living in that world right now?

If there were a way it worked out to be cheaper to pay per episode online than upgrade cable to include a certain channel for the sake of a single show, I could easily see spending a few bucks to watch a show on Hulu, rather than waiting for DVD (which is the other way we watch a lot of our television).

So, Hulu, and shows that aren't currently available on Hulu (pointedly glancing at Mad Men here), work with me, and I'm willing to work with you.

On the other hand, I won't lie to you, if I think it costs too much I'll just keep waiting for Netflix. I am a patient person, and canny with my entertainment dollars. And obviously, you couldn't charge for stuff that's already on video the same way you could for current shows. Stuff that's on video would have to stay pretty darn cheap. If you're competing with my ability to rent a DVD, you have to go some to make it a deal.

But certainly for new shows, if there's a price point that seems inexpensive enough to me that I'd just as soon pay it as wait for video, and that's still enough to make it worth the content owners' while to sell it to me, I don't see why we can't all live happily ever after.

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