CBS boss Les Moonves doesn't think there's enough money to make putting content on Hulu worthwhile, so his network won't be going there anytime soon. Shows earn "only pennies" online, but a single episode of CSI costs about $3 million to produce, he said during a presentation at The Cable Show.
"If too many people shift to online, I'm not going to be able to produce CSI. That's why we're not going on Hulu," he said.
Moonves' comments echoed those of cable chiefs earlier in the week. David Zaslav, president-CEO of Discovery Communications said it "didn't make business sense" to put long-form content on Internet platforms and that "more sophisticated" bites of short-form video are better for the audience and the provider. "You have to be there or you lose relevance with a generation," Zaslav warned.
Back to Hulu, the service has disappointed the techheads of the world by sticking with Adobe's Flash technology rather than switching to an HTML5 video player because, according to Eugene Wei, Hulu's vice president of product, "HTML5 as of now doesn't yet meet all of our customers' needs."
For more:
- see this story on Moonves' comments
- and this coverage of Hulu's Adobe Flash decision
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