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Pondering ‘Glee,’ Hulu and TV Windowing

By Stewart Schley, Jul 12, 2011

Pondering ‘Glee,’ Hulu and TV Windowing

My friend Kimberly is a Gleek: an all-in fan of FOX Television’s popular and adorkable sing-along serial drama “Glee.” She’s also one of those people who supposedly don’t really exist, at least if you subscribe to prevailing television industry research. That is to say, she’s a cord-cutter. She doesn’t pay a dime for pay TV service, and the only broadband wire running into her home carries IP bits, not ESPN and MTV (or at least not the linear channels thereof). And counter to the conventional wisdom around cord-cutting, she’s no slacker. She has a great job, owns a home, pays bills, travels, and watches television over Hulu.  

So she makes the perfect sounding board for a question that’s much on the minds of Internet video people these days: how important is it that Hulu or any other mainstream video site offer program episodes shortly after their linear-network premiere?

Her answer: Not very.

My friend says she’s aware that new “Glee” episodes showed up on Tuesday evenings on FOX last TV season. But that’s a secondary impression. For her, the real debut for “Glee” was on Wednesdays, when a new show was planted on Hulu.

Let’s allow that to sink in, because the distinction is subtle. My friend got into the habit of watching a new episode of “Glee” every Wednesday last fall, because that’s when she knew the show would be posted for viewing on Hulu. She had established, in TV parlance, a rhythm of “appointment viewing.”

What she didn’t do is spend much time thinking about the relationship between the Hulu premiere and the original “Glee” airdate on FOX, save for the occasional moment when a colleague at work might talk about the FOX premiere the night before. The same holds true for other programs she watches on Hulu or from TV network websites. “I don’t pay attention to that,” Kimberly told me. “I find I forget what night of the week these shows are on.”

It’s an interesting observation. Amid all the hand-wringing going on right now about Hulu’s valuation and potential sale, there’s much ado about how permissive Hulu’s owners (the parent companies of FOX, ABC and NBC) will be about granting Hulu program rights for primetime shows within a day or two of their network debut, which is the present practice.

Here’s how the Los Angeles Times recently encapsulated the issue:

Changes in the familiar Hulu service could also make the company less attractive to a buyer. For example, Hulu's owners are pushing for the free service to require users to prove they are cable or satellite TV subscribers before they could gain next-day access to current shows, said two people privy to the discussions. Otherwise, they would be forced to wait eight days to catch up on programs they've missed, they said. (Here’s the full story link.)

The thinking among the television cognoscenti appears to be that there’s keen consumer interest, knowledge and awareness of the timing differential between the network premiere and the online video availability. The closer the two moments in time are, goes the thinking, the more valuable the online video rights assignment. In other words, offering “Glee” on Hulu within a day of the network premiere tends to elevate the value of the Hulu rights assignment, and possibly have a slight devaluation impact on the network premiere. On the other hand, waiting days or even a week before planting the new “Glee” on Hulu will tend to elevate the value of the linear network episode and possibly reduce the appeal of the Hulu episode.

Or not.

The truth is that perceptions of how television works are very different in the television business than they are in the consumer domain. To network TV schedulers and strategists, assigning rights windows based on time differential is of immense strategic importance. Fine-grained gradations between network premieres and online video debuts are studied and pondered as if even a slight misstep might topple the delicate TV viewer psyche. My colleague at One Touch Intelligence, Wendy Pacheco, who studies online video windowing as closely as anyone, says networks and online video platforms devote keen attention to evaluating the influence of online windowing on both viewing patterns and monetization initiatives.

Maybe secretive research possessed by television networks and online video purveyors backs up the theory that viewers are ultra-sensitive and ultra-knowledgeable about video episode windowing. And yes, the Nielsen Live + 3 measurement approach may argue for a compact timing gap between network premieres and online availability.

But these inside-baseball considerations don’t mean much to viewers. In the real world, so long as current-season shows are available within a relatively reasonable time frame via Hulu or elsewhere, fans will find them. And for my friend Kimberly and others, the moment they hit the “play” button on Hulu marks the only premiere of “Glee” (or any other program) that really matters: theirs.