If you want to get an idea of how Hulu’s recent deal with Miramax plays out for the average OTT viewer, Roku puts it into perspective.
Could this be heaven or could this be hell?
And no, we’re not talking about the post in which Roku lists some of the titles that Miramax will get for Hulu Plus. As far as we can tell, we just don’t care — it’s a bunch of movies we’ve already seen and probably won’t lose sleep if we can’t stream them on Netflix.
Clearly, Hulu cares.
But what does it mean for us? Three words: à la carte.
The closest we can figure is that OTT is becoming like a disjointed set of poorly-managed cable networks in what would otherwise be an on the menu, unbundled ordering.
So, if you want steak, you have to go to Hulu Plus. If you want a $79 a year, all-you-can-eat buffet of food you’d never buy in the first place, there’s Amazon video. And if you want a salad, you have to go to Netflix. And if you want your meal to be periodically (and quite awkwardly) interrupted by advertising, there’s Crackle.
That’s pretty much the size of it. In order to eat your fill, you’re traipsing from one service to another.
Which — if you’re in the cable industry — you’ve been trying to prevent for years. But we actually think that this will be a good thing for Pay TV services. Because it’s simply not convenient to have to bounce around between these OTT channels, figuring out which movies from 1995 are on which channel. Furthermore, it’s a lot less convenient to have to subscribe to each service. And it’s even less convenient to have to try to keep track that this movie is from Miramax and that movie is from…well…whatever other companies make movies.
In the end, we just want to turn on the TV and watch. This shouldn’t be an academic exercise.
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