Hulu Sets Record in January, Time Warner CEO Not Impressed

9 Mar, 2010 By: Erik Gruenwedel

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Visitors to Hulu, the online repurposed TV program site co-owned by The Walt Disney Co., News Corp. and NBC Universal, watched 23.5 videos each during the month of January, representing an all-time high for the property, according to new data from comScore.

Hulu tracked 38.4 million unique visitors who watched 903.1 million videos — a distant second to perennial video juggernaut YouTube. The Google-owned property again dominated the data with 136.4 million unique visitors watching an average of 93 videos during the month — up 50% from the same period last year.

Other properties included Yahoo sites with 51.5 million viewers (8.5 videos per viewer), CBS Interactive with 41.2 million viewers (5.3 videos per viewer), Fox Interactive Media (which includes MySpace) with 40.4 million unique viewers (7.2 videos per viewer), and Viacom Digital with 38 million viewers and 9.3 videos per viewer.

Notable to Hulu is that the videos viewed represented professionally produced episodic TV programming, unlike the majority of user-generated content on YouTube with duration of about 4.1 minutes on average.

Still, the incremental revenue and margins afforded ad-supported Hulu aren’t enough to sway some media companies, including Time Warner.

Speaking March 9 at an investor conference in New York, CEO Jeff Bewkes, who is a champion of TV Everywhere, a program under which media companies repurpose content to monthly subscribers for free across multiple digital properties, said he had no interest in putting television and movie content from Warner Bros. on unproven platforms, such as Hulu, with significantly lower margins.

“What we have not done is put content online for free with minimal ad support,” Bewkes said.

Indeed, Viacom last month pulled “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report” from Hulu, with speculation the popular shows’ retransmissions may appear next month on Apple’s pending iPad tablet.

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