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Disney and Hulu in 'serious' talks over partnership
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Online video provider Hulu.com already hosts
The Walt Disney Company and Hulu.com have reignited their negotiations for online content distribution, according to Reuters. The programming in question is that of Disney's ABC network, which currently airs channel flagships "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost." If both the media conglomerate and commercially ballooning online video service can strike a deal, Disney is prepared to offer more than just prime time staples such as "Ugly Betty," but also content from its secondary outlets, ESPN and the Disney Channel.
As of present, ABC displays its original programming on its own site, AOL.com and Comcast's shamelessly overblown Fancast player.
This could spell sheer victory for sites similar to Hulu, where convergent-hungry media distributors have crawled to for solace. Hulu may not be a godsend for Disney executives yearning to establish a sense of exclusivity around their brand, but it is a temporary savior for viewers who are agitated with network television's well-intentioned, yet vainly online transition. In other words, the major channels have respectably attempted to adapt, but have been too set on monopolizing their own content to realize the common effort. Aggregating the network's most popular programming under the protection of a credible (and ad-supported) website would be the wisest decision they could make at this point in their arguably abortive tries at bridging the television set with the desktop computer.
The music labels have already experienced this lesson and corrected their shortcomings; it is only a matter of time (and time's financial implications) before these channels follow suit. When individual record studios embarked on selling digital tracks only proprietary of their own artists, customers balked and resorted to peer-to-peer file sharing networks. More than six years after the collapse of Napster, it appears the music industry has finally come to their senses — iTunes is the most lucrative MP3 vehicle in the world, symbolizing a melting pot of dozens of record labels. It should not take Big Televsion half a decade to figure this one out on their own.
