Hulu Should Go Even More Social
It’s not like the writing isn’t on the wall or anything, but NBC appears to have smartened up by leveraging their kick-ass content and putting it in the correct wrapper. The key praise for NBC here is that they provide the Flash embed code, a la YouTube, which other quality content providers like Comedy Central and HBO do not (not yet anyway). Embed code allows bloggers to host the videos on their site without taking on the infrastructure costs of bandwidth. So now, NBC’s potential business model looks a whole lot like YouTube now.
To improve their service, NBC should allow users to respond to TV shows with some ideas of their own, all in the world of Hulu. YouTube currently does this for its UGC (User Generated Content) by allowing community members to upload video responses, but if Hulu were to extend this offer to each of its TV shows’ fan base, every series could be a work in progress, reflecting the truly collaborative nature of TV production. NBC could plant all sorts of projects on its site and could see what happens, not forgetting to reward key members of the community, of course.
