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Real Time - the new On Demand

May 29, 2009 Hulu has gotten a lot of hype this week for its plans to stream a Dave Matthews concert live online Monday. It's the first time Hulu will stream a concert live, though the site has streamed a presidential debate and some other news events live in the past few months.

Real time is all of a sudden all the rage after the last couple years when studios, TV networks and everyone else rushed to offer anything and everything on demand all the time so that no one had to be bothered with watching anything on anyone else's schedule. But now, real time is the new buzzword. Real time searches on Twitter, real time March Madness through CBS Sports, real time concerts on Hulu. Today, Microsoft and British broadcaster Sky announced a deal to stream live TV through Xbox 360 consoles in the U.K. and Ireland.

At the Wall Street Journal's AllThingsDigital conference this week, Liberty Media's John Malone seemed to sum up the business appeal, when he said most revenues are coming from real time events that can draw in an audience. "There is an economic move to things of high value moving to a larger audience," Forbes quoted him as saying.

At the same time that online streaming goes live, or becomes more TV-like, on Thursday Hulu launched its new Hulu Desktop, described as "lean back viewing for your PC," allowing viewers to watch a show in full screen mode and navigate through the site with a computer remote, just like watching on a TV.

Because someday, we'll all be able to sit back on a couch, turn on a TV and watch live TV. Wait. What?

Posted by Jennifer Netherby on May 29, 2009 | Comments (0)