Hulu to stream Dave Matthews Band show
Hulu has announced that it'll be live-streaming a concert for the first time: a June 1 show by the Dave Matthews Band at New York's Beacon Theater. The online video hub will be the only place streaming the small concert live, at least legally.
Context & Ripple Effects
Hulu enters this announcement riding a mixed 2009: the News Corp.-NBC joint venture surged in viewership through March, got its 'evil plot to destroy the world' branding moment in a Super Bowl commercial with Alec Baldwin, and signed its first international content deals in early May — yet confirmed reporting has its own partners News Corp. and NBC pulling back from the venture, and advertisers staying leery of the site despite the audience. An April report also flagged a Hulu app for Apple's iPhone and iPod touch expected within months.
Against that backdrop, the June 1 Dave Matthews Band show at New York's Beacon Theater is Hulu's first-ever live stream, and the only legal place to watch the small venue concert as it happens — an exclusive-event play layered onto what has so far been an on-demand TV library.
First-order effects
- Hulu converts its scale problem into a differentiation asset: an exclusive live event gives the ad-leery marketplace a format no rival library of reruns can match, while the band's fans get one sanctioned destination for a show too small for broadcast.
Second-order effects
- Competing video hubs face pressure to bid for their own live music exclusives rather than compete solely on licensed TV catalogs, and promoters gain a new revenue window for theater-scale shows that traditional media could never carry profitably.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, streaming services drift from pure on-demand repositories toward scheduled live programming — a structural step toward these hubs becoming genuine broadcast substitutes, with rights holders negotiating event-by-event exclusivity instead of catalog licensing.
The trend: Online video platforms are moving beyond licensed on-demand catalogs by acquiring exclusive live events, with music performances as the first proving ground.