Hulu Going to Paid Model Next Year, Users Think Sky Is Falling

Hulu has previously made vague comments alluding to the addition of premium access earlier this year, but comments from NewsCorp’s Chase Carey freaked everyone out for some reason, when it really shouldn’t have.

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Chase Carey, an executive with Fox parent company NewsCorp announced on Thursday that Hulu was planning to move to a paid model next year with the following comments:

“not all content on Hulu would be behind a pay wall”

and

“it’s time to start getting paid for broadcast content online”

Speculation on pay models has run rampant with pay models involving everything from a hard pay wall with membership required for access to a similar tiered model used by streaming portals Crunchyroll and The Anime Network and everything inbetween.

For one thing, not even Hulu knows what they are going to do in terms of its planned paid content model yet and it doesn’t help everybody is playing Chicken Little when it was obvious that Hulu was taking steps toward that model earlier this year with no one noticing.

Another small detail being ignored is this observation from AllThingsD:

Hulu is trying to figure out how to create some kind of premium offering where you’ll pay for stuff that isn’t on the site right now.

I added the emphasis on “right now” to make a point.

Because of licensing and other issues, certain primetime shows such as Family Guy and The Simpsons are limited in how many episodes are available for streaming at a given time. The same goes for other series on Hulu, with many other shows being listed but not even available for viewing such as Food Network and certain Discovery Networks programming.

As far as anime is concerned, nothing’s going change on that front, because the main issue lies with revenue from network broadcast content like House and The Office, not other forms of programming.

Anime fans can breathe easy on that front, or they can use other widely available options (YouTube, Crunchyroll, TAN, Funimation Video, Viz, Manga, etc.) that suit such viewing habits better than Hulu at the moment.