Hulu's unexpected response to piracy

I’m sure I’m not the first to suggest this, but streaming television sites like Hulu.com and ABC.com have managed to subvert piracy in rather unexpected ways. It’s no surprise that Hollywood is a main cultural export from America—-certainly Canadians like myself can barely distinguish between Canadian and American content, but the phenomenon is global as well. Sabotaging P2P and Bittorrent was popular back in 2006-2008, but the ensuing PR disaster and limited success means that you see little (overt) sabotage today (I’m convinced that it still occurs, more than ever in fact, but in more subtle and fundamental ways). Media piracy still occurs, but for TV shows that are available free (and ad-supported) through Hulu and the like, the marginal effort for pirates to upload and download this content through illegal ways grows ever so slightly too great. The upshot is that media companies have a solution to control their distribution again, the side effect is that they have priced it down to nearly zero. There is more to be said here, about whether control really changed as the distribution mechanisms changed, and about the new world of streaming television coming as a result of the Comcast purchase, but the observation alone will have to suffice for now.