Hulu Plus ‘On Track’ To Exceed One Million Subscribers This Year

Hulu Plus, the subscription service that launched last November, says it is “on track” to sign up more than a million paying customers by the end of this year.

It’s a far cry from the 20 million people who subscribe to ideological twin Netflix, but it’s a heck of a start — and it comes amid fertile innovation around the flat screen TV you take everywhere, otherwise known as the iPad.

Hulu Plus was in private beta for months last year but opened up to everyone on Nov. 4 (a day after a Dish Network VP says the network-backed video-on-demand online service, was destroying television). Hulu doesn’t offer live programming, but slightly delayed on-demand prime-time shows from four broadcast networks (not CBS) and about 260 others, as well as vintage programs of the “TV Land” variety. It initially charged $10 a month, but reduced that to $8 in short order.

Hulu also said that revenue was “on pace” to reach $500 million this year, primarily from 289 (so far) advertisers. Some $300 million of that will go to content providers.

Hulu is available on computers and a range of gaming platforms and soon but its greatest potential is tapping into the mobile device revolution. Conditions are ripe: There are millions of tablets being sold, on-demand is considered a feature rather than a bug in the age of the DVR, and wireless carriers are permitting video streaming on their strained 3G networks.

Now that TV is just an app, it really can go anywhere in a way that Sinclair and Sony only dreamed of.

These days “anywhere” also includes about the house: both Time Warner and Cablevision — competitors of a kind to the sort of streaming TV service Hulu provides — are offering iPad apps which let their subscribers watch live programming, but only when connected to home internet service they also provide. And let us not forget SlingBox, the pioneer in letting you watch your TV, at any hotspot anywhere in the world.

A comparison to Netflix isn’t entirely fair, since the latter has been around quite a bit longer, is already responsible for 20 percent of peak U.S. bandwidth use, and is primarily about movies and TV shows from seasons past. But in the disruptive media universe Hulu and Netflix are joined at the hip, and both would now seem to be rising stars in the battle for the virtual living room.

Nieman Lab Analysis Paints Grim Trajectory for The Daily

Interest in The Daily seems to be waning, according to a Nieman Journalism Lab analysis based on Twitter sharing activity. After an initial spike of interest, then an app upgrade which eliminated some technical problems, News Corp.’s iPad-only publication has settled onto a undesirable trajectory best described as “decline, plateau, decline,” according to Nieman author Joshua Benton.

There are a number of caveats, not the least of which is that the Nieman study doesn’t count readers: It can’t, and News Corp. is under no obligation to publicly disclose this metric.

News Corp. said a month ago that downloads were in the “hundreds of thousands.” But even this doesn’t reveal much, because the app is inoperable unless you pay for a subscription after a trial period.

In the absence of primary data, Nieman had the intriguing idea to extrapolate from the indirect evidence of the number of times a Daily story was tweeted from within the app. The idea is that sharing trends might indicate relative subscriber levels, assuming that the sharing impulse is pretty much always the same.

Nieman acknowledges that tweeting volume needn’t necessarily correlate with subscribership in an intuitive way. Still, the theory seems sound: If tweeting from The Daily goes up, it might only mean that people are tweeting more, or it could mean that more people are tweeting. If tweeting goes down, it might mean that the impediments to tweeting have increased (e.g., the button was resized in an app upgrade, which didn’t happen), or it might mean that there are fewer subscribers.

Whatever the cause, tweeting from within the app has consistently trended down, Nieman found, using the help of social media firm PostRank, in what it called “a discouraging trend.”

“While a certain amount of decline would be expected after the initial rush of attention, the fact that there’s never been an appreciable, sustained uptick in sharing isn’t cause for optimism,” Nieman said. “Also remember that, in the middle of this stretch, Apple released the iPad 2 — literally millions of new iPads have been purchased in this narrow window, creating millions of new potential Daily customers who might want to download one of the platform’s most promoted apps.”

There have been only 6,026 tweets generated from within The Daily from launch day, Feb. 2, through March 31, Neiman found. “Its activity on Twitter seems to match my own perceptions of how they’re doing — an early rush of excitement; a decline as people lost interest and the app struggled with technical problems; a plateau once the tech got sorted out; and then another decline once the

Blockbuster Saved by Dish, But What’s Left of Video-Store Biz?

The Dish satellite network has successfully bid $320 million in a bankruptcy auction for Blockbuster Video, the once-mighty rental chain squeezed out by Netflix on one end of the spectrum and dollar-a-night supermarket movie-vending machines at the other.

Dish seems determined to keep the brand and at least some bricks-and-mortar locations alive. But how long will be it before hard-copy delivery of movies and TV shows will be anything more than a niche play?

“With its more than 1,700 store locations, a highly recognizable brand and multiple methods of delivery, Blockbuster will complement our existing video offerings while presenting cross-marketing and service extension opportunities for Dish Network,” Tom Cullen, executive vice president of Sales, Marketing and Programming for Dish Network, said in a statement. “While Blockbuster’s business faces significant challenges, we look forward to working with its employees to re-establish Blockbuster’s brand as a leader in video entertainment.”

Clearly Blockbuster’s on-demand streaming service was a big asset for Dish to acquire. Adding it to the Dish network’s existing array of offerings makes it a more significant product than its current incarnation as an also-ran competitor to Netflix and Amazon. Those services are already challenging satellite and cable providers for on-demand Hollywood fare and for subscription dollars.

Blockbuster has learned, just as Borders did, that being a well-located, ubiquitous retailer with a cornucopia of content isn’t necessarily enough to beat the nibblers like RedBox (which sells your product to customers in the midst of their daily errands) and the upstart innovators you haven’t yet caught up to (digital media).