The Best-Laid Plans Of Mice And Men

The laws of nature have proven that anytime you upset a delicate balance, there are ramifications. I don’t blame Warner TV for chasing the revenue rainbow. It’s the nature of business, and they wouldn’t do it unless they saw huge income potential. The world of new media is changing, and what media company wants to be left behind? Still, there are too many unknowns in the plan that won’t guarantee the instant success the execs would like their shareholders to believe. While the idea is simple, especially with the declining prospects of network television, the streaming logic is not a catch-all. Audiences don’t have to watch ads on iTunes downloads, plus with this streaming structure, they can’t watch Warner shows on iPods anywhere they want. Isn’t that the specific reason why people download shows? High speed Internet connections aren’t everywhere, so static content is still going to be necessary. WBTVG and its parent company needs to remain committed to the mixed use strategy for a long while.

Competition is different in this medium. In starting these online streaming sites, big studios aren’t necessarily going after each other. They all own an impressive amount of exclusive content and control and want to make their share of money from it. It’s all about traffic. By pushing into this market, studios are more likely to run into competition with the average Joe with a video camera, but they’re competing with a staggering marketing and capital budget. WBTVG is coming to the party with a vast library of old shows, resources to build the needed infrastructure, and the expertise in creating and running successful content. Oh, and there’s the huge legal department. By facing the independent video makers head on, they’re essentially taking out a hornet’s nest with a flamethrower. How that looks from a PR standpoint remains to be seen.

Then there’s the technological risk. Good technology cannot be rushed, and bad technology creates many hard feelings among the tech savvy. There’s rumbling amongst some in the tech community that Hulu isn’t living up to its hype. TechCrunch recently reviewed Hulu and found that while it did a lot of things right, such as good video quality, intuitive controls, and great content, the site is still suffering from unfulfilled expectations. The beta product had jumpy streaming and was very slow to get archived content on the site, not to mention that people outside the U.S. can’t view the content. In their conclusion, they found that Hulu was “far from perfect.” If Hulu doesn’t launch smoothly when it opens to a wider audience, their troubles could prove to be a cautionary tale to others trying to implement similar platforms.