TV has physical limits; they can't broadcast every episode of every show whenever people want to watch it. The Internet doesn't have those limits; the whole point of Hulu is that it should inherit the benefits of the Internet.
That doesn't negate my argument though. Hulu is a creation of major content owners getting together and agreeing to put their content in one place and to run advertisements against it. The problem is that the same content owners who agree to put their content up for a limited time are also not getting the full picture of how things have changed in the last few years. The methods for distribution have changed. The content creators no longer have sole control over the distribution medium, like original tv and radio broadcasting stations.
The first major break in that decades old paradigm was the wide-spread growth of cable networks. This opened up more viewing opportunities and made room for new networks. Comedy Central itself is an example of this. The major networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS fought against cable pretty heavily in the beginning. Then they finally caught on and that has been their primary broadcast medium for the last 20-30 years. Now its happened again, and this time not only are the old networks being reactionary, so are the same cable networks that sprouted up as cable tv spread around. This time distribution is online and essentially worldwide. The content owners are now treating their own websites and services like channels and tv stations. They want to make the audience come to them in order to get access to content. They have yet to catch on that this will fail too.
The audience, us, will get content wherever we want it. A lot of us download via filesharing and p2p sites. Some of us buy via services like Amazon and iTunes. Most of us still watch TV, but more and more of us have DVRs and choose to skip over commercials. We will watch content how and where we want.
The rules of the new paradigm basically mean that content is no longer packageable. You can't wrap it up in a tape or disk, lock it into a channel, or lock it down to a website. The audience is no longer vertical, but has instead gotten much wider and deeper. If you want to make money from the content you produce, you have to spread it out to every distribution method where you can get some kind of incremental revenue from it. Instead of having your content on your one station or website, keep it there and also push it out to Hulu, TV.com, iTunes, Amazon, Xbox Live, and wherever else you can push it to. Don't remove your content from certain services as an artificial mechanism to try to direct where your audience goes to get it. All you end up doing is alienating your fans and turning them off.
I agree with you that Hulu is not perfect. They should really keep the episodes on forever, especially since they are available 24/7 for download via Amazon,iTunes, or p2p. The networks haven't realized that they are losing control of content distribution. But I think this shows that Hulu has a decent idea of whats going on and is doing what it can in this situation to compete.
Yeah. I agree with you: I think it ought to be distributed widely and efficiently. But I understand it from the point of view from the content providers/DVD salesmen.
I like that Hulu's playing it fair. I'd like to hope that they'll become more and more open as time goes on, or that somebody else does.
They also remove The Daily Show after two weeks, because Comedy Central wants to archive it on their own show. They have that right as content owners.
So I get that you don't like that, but it's their right, and the fact is that Hulu's so good because they work well with others.