In a piece featured on CNBC today, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar said that the company is looking to act as a portal for cable company’s content. The proposed system would be one where cable subscribers would receive a special password. This password could then be used in Hulu’s premium section to authenticate that the user is in fact a customer of the cable services partnered with Hulu. For example, if you were a Comcast subscriber and Comcast struck a deal with Hulu, you’d be able to see all of Comcast shows via the Hulu website.
The cable companies are going to almost certainly partner with Hulu or offer their own similar service. Right now, Comcast and Time Warner and the like are looking for reasons to convince customers to stay as subscribers instead of just getting shows via sites like Hulu and Netflix. One possibility, however, is that the companies will choose to pass up Hulu in favor of launching their own proprietary service. But doing so would create a more decentralized streaming ecosystem, and it would remove the advantage of using Hulu’s destination site status. Someone who frequently goes to Hulu anyway might have incentive to remain a Time Warner Cable customer if it meant that he would be able to view both Hulu’s offerings and his cable content in one place. The alternative, having a cable company with its own content portal, would require more of a change of behavior: users would have to acclimate themselves to checking multiple sites rather than just one.
