We've written a few times about the Parents Television Council, the infamous nonprofit group that sends out alerts any time anything it considers indecent is aired on TV or shows up elsewhere that the PTC doesn't like. Back when Kevin Martin was at the FCC, the PTC actually appeared to have some influence, but since then, its influence has clearly dwindled quite a bit. And with a court recently rejecting the FCC's attempts at fining those who upset the PTC as unconstitutional, the organization is apparently struggling with being relevant. I'd also guess that a growing number of people think that PTC's fear mongering is totally ridiculous and unfounded. For example, its latest grandstanding is about the CBS TV show $#*! My Dad Says. I would guess that most people simply don't care. And that's reflected in the fact that donations are way down to the PTC, and while the group claims 1.3 million members, only about 12,000 people seem to actually be active.

However, the NY Times recently had an article that suggests things are even more screwed up for the PTC than what was already known. It includes accusations from a whistleblower who worked at the PTC that the organization would ignore petitions that were sent in, just taking donations and not doing anything with the material. To understand what apparently happened, you need to understand how the PTC works. It generally sends out hyped up FUD-filled "petitions" that it asks people to sign, with promises that the PTC will pass them on to the FCC or whoever else. Except, the accusations claim that the PTC would take the returned envelopes, take out the cash, but then never pass them on to the FCC.

For a group that tries to present itself as being super ethical, taking money and failing to live up to what you promised to do in exchange for the money seems pretty unethical.

The group's response to this seems to be to attack the whistleblower, trying to turn his request for severance after he left the organization into a claim that he was trying to extort money from them. Unfortunately for the PTC, after the LAPD investigated the accusations of extortion, it found that the guy did not commit extortion. Rather than admitting that, it seems that any time anyone brings up these questions, the PTC goes right back to accusing the guy of extortion. At some point, you'd have to think that if the PTC continues to make such charges, the guy might actually have a decent defamation claim against them....

As has been predicted and expected for quite some time, Hulu has finally announced its subscription plans. Let's start with the one thing they got right: unlike some newspaper paywalls and such, they're not technically putting the existing offerings behind this subscription wall. Technically, you can still use Hulu for free the same way you did in the past, but as I explain in a bit, this might not work out in practice. So what do you get for your $10 per month? Well, you get access to the latest full season of shows from ABC, NBC and Fox (co-owners of Hulu). Of course, this isn't exactly a benefit. It just means that, unlike currently, Hulu doesn't delete shows quite as quickly -- a point that had been annoying users of the site. What else do you get? Well, you still get the annoying pre-roll/mid-roll/post-roll commercials, so you're not paying to get rid of those. And... hmm... well, if you pay, Hulu is just slightly less obnoxious about trying to block you from accessing the content on a television (even with a perfectly legitimate setup).

That appears to be it. I'm trying to figure out who thought this was compelling. Basically, for $10/month, Hulu will be slightly less annoying to the average user by not deleting content during the season and maybe kinda sorta letting you access Hulu on your TV if you happen to use the "approved" equipment. Of course, you could also use a system that gets around Hulu's bizarre and pointless TV blocks just as easily, but we'll skip over that for now.

Looks like another lost opportunity. Hulu could have come up with real reasons to buy by actually adding value. Instead, it just focused on being slightly less annoying. Some might not see these as being all that different (doesn't it add value to be less annoying?). That's true, but there is a fundamental difference: anyone can be less annoying without getting people to pay for it. Any business should be striving to be less annoying all the time in their core product. When you set up your subscription service around "we'll be less annoying," you've now given yourself a perverse and dangerous set of incentives. You now have the incentive to be more annoying in your core product in a push to get people to sign up for the less annoying product. Effectively, it's nagware, which may work for some segment of the market, but is not about providing more positive value, but about minimizing negative value. That's not a growth strategy.

Wanderlust wrote in to point out the rumors doing the rounds today that Hulu is getting ready to launch a paid subscription service, something that's popped up before. Apparently Hulu is looking to offer the five most recent episodes of a show for free, then will charge $10 a month for access to older episodes. There aren't a ton of details, so it's not clear exactly how the plan will play out. But we can say this: unless Hulu is adding some real value for users, and not just putting currently free content behind a paywall, it's doomed to failure. It's pretty clear that some of Hulu's corporate overlords think all of its content should be behind a paywall. But erecting a paywall will simply drive Hulu users to unauthorized downloads and streams, delivering those content providers absolutely nothing. All too often these paywalls are based on the idea that once users have nowhere else to go, they'll start paying; the reality is, though, there's always somewhere else to go.

Hulu's success thus far has been by attracting users with a good choice of content presented in a good interface, reflecting something of an understanding that the way to compete with free, unauthorized content is to offer users something better. It's already started to undermine some of its success by blocking certain browsers in an attempt to force users to only access its content (and its advertising) through means of which it approves, and the paywall represents yet another step towards replacing a product that's better than unauthorized content with one that's worse. In any case, when online streaming TV shows are already pulling in some high ad rates, does it make any sense at all for Hulu to start throwing up paywalls?

A new report estimates that some 800,000 American households now watch TV only via the Web, as the move to abandon cable, satellite or OTA broadcasts starts to gather pace. This represents a small percentage of the pay TV industry's 101 million subscribers, but the number is expected to double by the end of next year. These are the earliest adopters, though, and they account for just 3 percent of all full-episode online television viewing -- meaning that plenty of people are already supplanting their standard TV viewing with online episodes. It's clear already (and has been for some time) that TV viewers are undertaking a fundamental change in how they want to access and view content. The combination of the Web and DVRs allowing on-demand viewing has made the linear TV channel something of an outdated concept, and at some point, TV providers will need to realize that on-demand shows are now how a growing number of people want to receive their programming.

Cable companies, for one, recognize this to a certain extent, so they've responded with TV Everywhere, a plan to offer programming online. But that plan is doomed to failure because it's being implemented in the hamfisted way you might expect from cable companies, and is set up simply to force people to keep paying for cable if they want to watch shows online. If the plan to capitalize on online viewers is first to force them to keep paying for something they don't want, then by further embracing the "features" of current systems that drive users away, it's hard to see TV companies having a whole lot of success. The key is not to shoehorn the cable model onto the web, but to embrace the positive features enabled by the web and apply them to the rest of their business.

It's the same old story we've seen over and over again: a new technology comes along and the industry it disrupts tries to demonize that technology as an evil that must be stopped. And yet, the "evil" never really turns out to be that bad, but it's sometimes amusing to go back and see what was said at the time. Karl Bode points us to this fun little commercial that network TV stations apparently put out in the early days of cable TV, warning how "pay TV is the monster in your living room." And, it urges viewers to "let your lawmakers know" in order to "save free television": Of course, these days, we keep hearing about how the networks want more and more and more cash from the cable/satellite providers just to keep that "free TV" available. Funny how things work out...

Just about a year ago, ABC TV exec Anne Sweeney was telling people at CES that they were in the providing good content business, and she wanted to see it delivered however people wanted to watch it, on whatever device they wanted. But, it's a little more difficult to apply that message to her own family, apparently. In the opening to an article about the whole "web vs. TV" debate (as if there really is one) in light of the Comcast/NBC deal, the piece opens with a story about Sweeney forcing her daughter to bring a television to college, despite the younger Sweeney's protests that she had no need for a TV:

"Mom, you don't understand. I don't need it," her 19-year-old responded, saying she could watch whatever she wanted on her computer, at no charge....

"You're going to have a television if I have to nail it to your wall," she told her daughter, according to comments she made at a Reuters event this week. "You have to have one."

Perhaps it's time to recognize that more and more people don't need a TV?

There's been a lot of talk these days about how the big flat-screen TVs that have become quite popular are also energy hogs (or, as some say, "the SUVs of the TV world"). One interesting concept to deal with this is to use facial recognition software to fade out the picture when the viewer is not watching. So, if you just have the TV on in the background, it doesn't suck up all that energy on the picture, but (in theory) the second you look up at the screen, the picture comes back. Of course, in the past, when we've talked about experiments to put cameras or monitoring equipment into TVs, it tends to freak people out a bit, and you could easily see the same technology being used for monitoring purposes. Still, it is a creative idea, if it actually works.

GamePolitics reports that the FCC is planning to study the idea of a "universal rating system" for all kinds of media, including movies, music, video games and television. According to the Bloomberg article on this, the FCC actually has a mandate to do this under a 2007 law that gave it authority to explore blocking technologies, though that seems to go well beyond the official mandate of the FCC to only monitor communications using public infrastructure. Furthermore, every single attempt to put in place a gov't mandated solution for a ratings system has been struck down as unconstitutional (and a bunch have been tried). Every rating system you see now are voluntary agreements from the industry. Having the FCC even explore such an issue raises some serious constitutional questions.

A popular theme at this year's Consumer Electronics Show is merging the internet with the television. As the WSJ reports, a number of companies have announced products that aim to bring net content into the living room: some LG televisions will be able to directly access Netflix's on-demand service. Intel and Yahoo want to put widgets in TVs, and so on. This isn't a new trend, but it's one that is definitely gathering pace. Just as computer screens are becoming popular places for television content, TV screens are quickly becoming destinations for internet content, thanks to the likes of Netflix and the Xbox, the Nintendo Wii, Apple TV and other products. That means that viewers are moving more and more towards an internet-like viewing experience, one in which they access the content of their choice when they want it, not according to the scheduling department of a TV network.

So will the further spread of internet content to people's living rooms hasten the demise of the TV channel? This is an idea that we've been kicking around for a few years now, that TV networks should unbundle their shows and move away from their schedule-focused format. In short, they need to stop thinking of themselves as broadcasters, and instead as content distributors, adapting their distribution networks to changing technologies and their viewers' changing demands. Certainly DVRs are already doing this, and some cable companies are taking the steps that TV networks won't by creating remote DVRs. But instead of embracing these developments and working to successfully monetize them, networks simply just try to shut them down. They must realize that television sets are nothing more than another screen for many types of content, not just on-ramps to network TV schedules. As it becomes easier for viewers to access internet content on their TVs, this lesson should become much clearer.