It's an Epidemic of Poor Decision Making

Those that work in customer satisfaction research remember the severe miscalculation made by Netflix when they decided to vastly change their policies, charge customers more, and switch to different types of services without consulting their customers on the effects of such a change. It almost completely wiped out Netflix, and in the end they had to bring back most of their services simply to survive. That's what happens when you fail to do research into customer satisfaction before making a business decision that affects your customers.

One would think that companies would learn from this poor planning. Indeed, one would think that at the very least, services like Netflix would learn from this poor planning. One would think that, but if one did, one would be wrong.

Hulu is Netflix's largest competitor, and Hulu is rumored to also be overhauling their service without consulting their customers. According to "The Mary Sue", Hulu – a service people only used so that they could cancel their cable – is about to force its users to have cable in order to operate Hulu. This is a completely nonsensical decision.

Hulu's primary draw is that it wasn't cable – customers could cancel their cable and watch the same shows streaming via Hulu. But instead, Hulu is caving to the whim of the cable companies and forcing its users to sign up for a service they don't want in order to use the service they deemed as an alternative. If this happens, and all indications are that it will, Hulu is going to see a massive wave of users cancel the streaming service, likely within the first few weeks.

Now, part of this is likely on purpose – Hulu is owned by companies that make much of their money via cable – but what these companies don't realize is that Hulu users aren't going to go back to cable, like they probably believe. Hulu has been the primary source for those that do not want to use illegal means of streaming online content to watch shows without resorting to cable. Without Hulu, it's far more likely that most of these law-abiding users that have been frustrated with cable all of these years are going to finally decide to take the plunge into illegal online streaming, rather than go back to an over-priced cable television model.

This is a horrific decision by the cable companies and by Hulu, and one that clearly did not involve consulting customers. It would be a surprise to see Hulu have any sort of success should this change take place.