Hulu, streaming, and the contemporary television ecosystem

In this essay, we take up three distinctive features of the US-based subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) platform Hulu: its ownership structure, its business deals, and its televisual aesthetics. Although there are substantial overlaps among these categories, we approach each of them separately so as to better enable us to link our analyses to some of the key questions and concerns about what contemporary television has become and how it should best be studied. By inserting Hulu into a conversation about today’s television ecosystem – a context from which it has been absent for too long – we purposefully broaden scholarly debates about SVOD platforms beyond that of Netflix and Amazon to reconsider some of the emergent conventions or common-sense norms that currently underpin our understanding of television in the Internet era. In the end, we argue streaming television is a multi-sited, quasi-iterative, and rapidly evolving marketplace, in which legacy practices persist alongside and often in competition with new modes of production, dissemination, and consumption.