14 DAY TRIAL // Online video may be thriving when it comes to viewers and there's little doubt that it will get even bigger in the coming years, along with better broadband speeds and availability, but for the time being, video sites aren't doing so great financially. YouTube hasn't reached profitability yet, Hulu is also struggling, despite both sites having a strong following. Things are even more complicated at Hulu as it's beginning to look like the site's media partners are increasingly unsatisfied with the way things are moving, each having their own ideas on the matter.
As MediaWeek reports, increasing competition between the networks' sales teams and the site's own sales people is complicating the already convoluted situation at Hulu. The popular video site is owned in part by three of the four major broadcast TV networks in the US. The networks all have a pretty big slice of the company and provide the site with content in exchange for a nice chunk of the ad revenue.
The discontent seems to be coming from the fact that Hulu's own sales team is aggressively courting customers often at the detriment of the networks. This competitiveness is making sales execs at the TV giants even more reluctant of the partnership and it looks like they may start offering perspective customers more incentives, sometimes in the form of ads against a specific show. So far, this hasn't been allowed and advertisers are only able to buy ad space in bulk and target it only by genre or demographic.
What's more, many are confused by the inconsistencies in the system and complain that the whole thing is harder than it needs to be. And things are about to get even more complicated with the increasing talks about paid content at the video site and by the recent news that NBC Universal, one of the three partner networks, is about to be sold to cable operator Comcast, as the company has its own ideas on how to handle online video, which are more than a little different than Hulu's.