MSN Video Player has only just launched earlier this month, but already the competition in the “video on demand” or (catch up TV) category is hotting up online. Hulu, the US online TV company owned by News Corp and NBC Universal, has been rumoured to be entering the UK market for some time and the latest reports indicate that this market entry is a step closer to reality.
Hulu is understood to have offered ITV an equity stake in return for access to ITV content in the UK market. Reports in Media Guardian suggest that the stake offered to ITV is “thought to be significant and possibly more than 25%”, but in the UK venture alone. It is not thought to have made an equity offer to other UK players such as Channel 4.
Hulu has been exploring options to launch a UK service with broadcasters since the scuppering of the BBC backed Project Kangaroo joint venture. Project Kangaroo was a joint venture between ITV, Channel 4 and BBC Worldwide to provide a single library of online on-demand TV content, but it was blocked by competition regulators in February.
A sticking point, as it was with Project Kangaroo, has been the question of ad sales. ITV has been reluctant to give up control of selling its own ads – it had wanted the contract for all ad sales for Project Kangaroo content – and splitting the sales of online ads for content on ITV Player and a Hulu UK service is tricky.
Indications are that ITV content would be a major traffic driver for Hulu. When itv.com relaunched as a full streaming service in August 2007 it attracted 1.2m views of TV shows across the whole of the third quarter that year, according to figures from Screen Digest. And Demand Five, Channel Five’s new streaming TV service that launched in June last year, managed 1.21m streams of TV shows in the third quarter last year.
The Hulu deal is for an online on-demand TV service. The question remains as to whether it will also be available on digital TV. Virgin Media already offer BBC iPlayer to their digital V households in full screen standard definition quality. It would be an exciting development if Hulu also was offered to digital V customers in the UK.
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