Online Media Cultist

A Slate article talks up “Hulu Hoopla” (is there really hoopla, I’d counter?) and then poses the question: is a new site the future of television?

My answer is probably not.

Sure, it’s a place you can go to watch some shows from the TV world, with pre-roll and mid-roll ads thrown in. And Hulu adds some social media components like ratings and comments.

But no one really knows what “the future of television” is going to mean, because there are dozens of models being toyed with at the moment, and there will be many dozens more tried out over the next few years. There will be successes and failures, and the successes will be copied and modified and refined and combined with other iterated successes to build something close to a standardized model. There will be a few massive products that make lots of money in the space, some mid-tier players, and a bunch of also-rans. And then everything will change and scramble – probably in the space of 12-18 months or so, and then the process will start again.

Fred Wilson had some interesting thoughts about online video this morning, which were on my mind while reading the Slate piece. Particularly, there will be the need for video to show up where audiences already are, whether it’s a social networking experience, or a blog, or a high traffic website top level page, and so on. Monetizing and tracking statistics from this kind of video distribution is still in its earliest stages, and services like Tubemogul, as Fred points out, are springing up as part of the development of this space.

So, Hulu is (somewhat) interesting, but it’s merely a small part of a much grander drama.