Sure, at first glance, charging you to stream movies may look like the best alternative because it offers a guaranteed cash flow and is easier to regulate, but is it really best over the long-term?
The way I see it, free streaming movies should be the norm, not the exception.
Right now, you can surf your way over to Hulu.com and play some movies for free without a hitch. Granted, they’re not the best movies around and most aren’t even close to new, but that doesn’t mean we should downplay its significance.
Hulu movies can be viewed as often as you’d like and feature commercials before they start and a handful of commercial breaks between scenes. And while that works fine, it’s quite obvious that Hulu and the film studios aren’t willing to make it more compelling.
But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen.
Here’s how I see it working:
Streaming old or crappy movies just doesn’t work. Why would someone want to waste time sitting through Attack of the Puppet People?
But if new and extremely popular movies were made available, things would be totally different. If after a movie like No Country for Old Men leaves theaters, it’s made available on a free streaming service, can you imagine the advertising revenue the service could generate from it? And in turn, how much revenue the movie studios could generate as well?
But in order to generate serious revenue, the services would be forced to play commercials. Playing them before the movie starts is a good idea, but I’m not too fond of dropping them in-between. It not only proves to be an annoyance, but it takes you out of the movie and totally changes the flow of it. Instead, maybe the service should start overlaying ads during the playback, or, if need be, it still can resort to commercial breaks if that makes it more financially viable.
Either way, the point of streaming movies is to turn an even greater profit than making people pay for the stream and with enough viewers and a logical revenue scheme, it should work.
In just a few months, Hulu has already proven to be a cash cow for TV studios and its success is most easily shown in the number of networks that have joined the fray and allowed their content to be made available since its launch. We also shouldn’t discount the fact that Hulu is run by the networks themselves, meaning they get all the benefits of ownership.
Why can’t the film studios follow suit? Instead of trying desperately to stop piracy and spend too much cash on it, it should save its money, invest in a service like Hulu, break out from its foolhardy misconceptions about the Internet, and embrace it. Upon doing so, it can establish advertising schemes in the vein of Hulu and allow you to watch movies whenever you’d like for free.
Sure, it may run against the way things have always been done in the movie business, but as theater revenue continues to fall and rentals slowly go away, the film industry needs to find something to pad its bottom line and free streaming movies seems like a great place to start.
Consider the impact of being able to sit at home, stream brand new movies anytime you’d like, and only be forced to sit through a handful of commercials that companies are paying huge sums of cash for.
If Hulu can service millions of people each month and grow at such a rapid rate, why can’t a free streaming movie service grow just as fast?
Paying for streaming may be a temporary solution, but it won’t be enough to stop piracy, nor become the best way to watch movies. If nothing else, Google, Hulu, and countless other services should have shown the film industry that free use of media is what appeals to people and if you invite that kind of service and monetize it thorough advertising, it can prove to be an even greater cash cow than you once expected.