Blog #6: My Classmate's EOTO

     In class, we listened to our classmate's EOTO presentations on a form of technology. There were a lot of interesting platforms and websites that were talked about, and a lot of them I use on a daily basis in my everyday life. One that particularly caught my eye was Drake's presentation of Hulu, a television streaming service. This is a platform that my family has been paying to use for years, but there was a lot of information that I did not know about the service before the presentation. 

          

    I first learned that Hulu was founded in March of 2007 by a group of executives in joint with a bunch of major companies. These companies included NBC and the Walt Disney Company. The official launch of the streaming service was made in March 2008, and hit the ground running very early on. The original idea of the platform was to create a place to stream cable shows the day after they premiere on live television, for a limited time. It was like television on the go, and it eliminated the need for DVDs. Hulu has changed how we consumed the entertainment, and brought a lot of shows that were hard to watch very easily accessible. 

    There are a lot of positives to the platform that we now know as Hulu. For one, they offer a lot of bundles, like a student discount. A lot of students really enjoy this bundle, because with the student discount bundle they offer access to Hulu and Showtime, another streaming service. This is all for $6.99, which is budget-friendly for a lot of college students. The streaming service has also created a lot of their own original shows and movies, that have become very successful and talked about. But with these positives also come some negative aspects. Hulu has been unable to compete with advertising costs compared to typical television programming. This makes it more difficult for Hulu to find people willing to buy advertising space on the streaming service, and companies are more willing to keep advertising on daytime television. 

    The last thing I learned from Drake is that Disney actually owns Hulu, which I had not known before. This means that in the future, we may find a lot more Disney content on the streaming service. This is not surprising, since with the launch of Disney+, the company seems to be trying to find space to stream their products wherever they can. I'm really glad Drake taught us about Hulu, because it made me a lot more familiar with the streaming service that I so often use without a second thought.