Crastinate

I remember my music collection as a young teenager. It mainly consisted of CDs that I got from signing up to Columbia House or BMG’s CD delivery service. I had more CDs than most of my friends. I’d say my total collection was about 50 CDs. That’s roughly 600 songs. That wouldn’t even fill up a 10GB iPod.

Now you have people of all ages carrying around over 50 GB in their pocket. Apple’s 80 GB iPod stores 40,000 songs! Please remember this when the music industry gives you their sob story about how their losing business because of piracy. They brought it upon themselves for reaping the profits of this mass consumption of their product without listening to their consumers (Apple had to pull teeth to get them to charge $1 a song). They could have avoided their current losses if they actually provided the consumers what they wanted ten years ago when MP3s were becoming popular.

Note to TV and movie studios: Make your content as accessible as possible and sell advertising (like what you’re doing with Hulu). Don’t make the same mistake as the music industry and try to milk the consumer for as long as possible.

I truly love Hulu. For those who don’t know, Hulu was a venture by NBC and FOX to bring their television shows onto a streaming site where they control the advertising. The interface was created by Avenue A | Razorfish and it’s clean and easy to use. Every episode from NBC and Fox isn’t on Hulu but they have a nice selection of shows and the content is updated within a couple days of the show’s airing. The service just works REALLY well. I watch the shows that I want, when I want. There are a few ads during the shows at the time when commercial would show up, but they’re short and unobtrusive.

Techcrunch just reported that Hulu has broken into the Top 10 video sites online knocking Google Video off the list.

Hulu users are streaming over 63 million videos and, on average, are watching over two hours of video per month each.

Wow! So I guess I’m not alone in loving Hulu. Why can’t TV studios understand? We’re happy to watch ads if you give us the content we want when we want it. You can’t beat piracy. People will always try to circumvent the established system. But if you can give us what we want, most of us won’t use Bittorrent ever again…maybe.