With all the razzamatazz of Hollywood, Hulu has announced, typically all hot news comes through a ‘blog’ these days, that it will be losing the Comedy Central shows it has run there since its inception, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. The blog was written by Andy Forssell, SVP of content & distribution for Hulu.
Perhaps this is the first sign of weakness at the Hulu juggernaut since it began a few years back, it might be the first in a line of many deserters. We have no special insight into why the shows were pulled, but this reeks to us of money. Hulu is loss making to the Nth degree, and doesn’t have any kind of timeline for profit and has only fairly recently begun taking advertising to pay for the service. With little or no revenue, that would mean that Comedy Central could make more money out of YouTube and every other online service, and we suspect that it was obliged to pull the shows because other online partners would be unhappy that Hulu wasn’t paying it way and yet it’s killing most other professional online video sites.
Faultline has always said that Hulu cannot survive and now, more than ever we think that if TV Everywhere survives, Hulu will find it harder and harder to source content from outside its three founders ‘ Fox (News Corp), NBC (now Comcast) and Disney. Comedy Central is owned by Viacom.
The Forssell blog was almost sniveling with praise for the departing shows, in order to keep in with Viacom, but anyone from here on that is not one of the owners of Hulu is unlikely to do the site any favors. Watch out for more, but perhaps clandestine, departures.