When Hulu launched its live television service last May, the aim was to provide users with the two genres of programming most cord-cutters felt were lacking among the available offerings: news and sports, the content that most quickly loses its appeal when viewed on demand.
For major sporting events, such as the ongoing Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, Korea, Hulu has created a curated experience in which viewers can select their favorite events and access the coverage through a special Winter Olympics tabs on the homepage for live competition and for highlights. This furthers Hulu’s ethos of being responsive to each viewer’s individual interests.
“The premise is to provide you with a deeply personal experience,” Hulu vice president of product, Richard Irving, told SportTechie.
To enrich the sports experience on Hulu With Live TV for its customers, Hulu is also beginning to roll out an improved video quality for many of its channels, all of which initially were broadcast at 30 frames per second. The first phase included the Turner family of networks and NBC affiliates; the second phase, announced a day before the Winter Olympics’ opening ceremony, included the remaining channels hosting Olympic coverage: NBC Sports, CNBC, USA and Olympic Channel. (Comcast-owned NBCUniversal holds a 30 percent ownership stake of Hulu.)
Hulu plans to repeat these centralized sporting hubs for other major events, likely to include this summer’s World Cup as well as college football and NFL playoffs, among others. When ESPN — whose parent company, Disney, now owns 60 percent of Hulu — airs its multi-feed megacasts, those too can be found in a single location rather than having viewers navigate all across the channel spectrum.
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As a personal testament to the priority sports fan put on watching games live, Irving said he streamed part of the Super Bowl’s fourth quarter on his iPad, which he had propped up in his bathroom while giving his one-year-old son a bath.
“Every major sporting event, we set a new concurrency record for Hulu,” Irving said.
The most recent such high-water mark, not surprisingly, occurred during Super Bowl LII earlier this month. Hulu has found that, among live TV subscribers, only 46 percent of their viewing time was allocated to live programming, although the majority of the live content (roughly 60 percent) was indeed spent on news and sports.
Nine months since its inception, Hulu remains bullish about its live programming, reporting that daily signups have increased 98 percent. Total subscribers number 17 million, as of last month, when Hulu also reported that its median viewer is 31 and its total ad revenue eclipsed $1 billion. This, Irving said, is predictably driven by the rise of the cord-cutting generation, the “existential” dilemma facing the TV industry for years.
“It was no longer existential,” he said. “It was a thing that was happening.”
Irving said Hulu is committed to responding to the feedback of its community, which may include a live TV guide feature in the future as well as
“This is really a living, breathing experience,” Irving said.