Hulu prefers expanding to Japan in stead of Europe

Hulu, the U.S. video on demand (VOD) service, is expanding to Japan. Later this year, the Japanese will have access to the video streaming service and they can watch movies and TV shows online.

Why Japan? Hulu cited a few reasons. Hulu sees Japan as an ‘unfulfilled market’ for online premium movies and TV shows. Furthermore, Japan has widespread broadband access and many Japanese have smartphones and other devices to get access to the internet. In addition, the Japanese are passionate about video content and also make a lot of TV shows and movies. This TV shows and movies would even have been featured among Hulu users in the U.S.

So why not expand to Europe? Surely the Europeans also use a lot of smartphones and make many TV shows and movies. One of the reasons is that there is no single internal (European) market with one European licensing model (‘one stop shop’) to protect the copyrights of audiovisual works. Therefore, unfortunately for the Europeans, the European market seems to be an unprofitable market for companies such as Hulu to bring their online content services to, as Hulu would have to deal separately with the copyrights in each European country. Also, the cultural and linguistic diversity of European works and of the consumers play a role. Therefore, the European market is very fragmented and various segments are often too small for a profitable business model.

Read more about Hulu and other VOD providers on Future of Copyright:

- Amazon closes deal with CBS and competes with Netflix
- Free Hollywood films via Hulu

Reference: cnet.com