Hulu Weighing Password Walls For Sake Of Cable Companies

As fans of "The Riches" may know, Hulu’s made would-be users sign in to see certain shows for quite a while now; the measure’s meant to protect children from mature content.  But passwords may prove to be a key in the process of bringing a lot of new stuff to Hulu, too.

Hulu CEO Jason Kilar intends to help cable companies solve a significant problem: although they’ve been understandably leery to give away their premium content for free online, they can’t afford to turn away from the Web.  And it wouldn’t be smart of them to lock everything up on a series of single-purpose, otherwise-ignored sites.

So as Julia Boorstin reported after speaking with Kilar, "Hulu would also like to be the destination for password-protected cable content just as it is the go-to-site for the content from the first couple of numbers on the TV dial."

Boorstin then noted that this isn’t at all farfetched, continuing, "When Time Warner Cable announced its test of a ‘TV Everywhere’ concept that will allow subscribers to access content on demand, online, it made it clear that Hulu could be one destination for subscribers to plug in their passwords and access those shows."

Unfortunately, no specific timeframes or deal terms were discussed.