Is Hulu Losing Ground to Paid Streaming Services?

As Netflix -- and to a lesser extent Amazon -- see their streaming video audiences surge, is Hulu on the decline?

According to a new survey conducted by Morgan Stanley, perhaps. The investment bank has just released its fourth annual survey on the media, cable and satellite businesses which contains several interesting nuggets.

For one, Netflix usage continues to grow, based on Morgan Stanley’s online survey of over 2,500 adults, while its lower profile competitor Amazon Prime Instant Video is also seeing its audience swell quickly. Thirty percent of respondents reported using Netflix, an increase of 5.5 percentage points versus the 2013 survey. In contrast, roughly 18 percent of respondents claimed to be using Amazon’s service, a 10 percentage point-jump compared to 2013.

What particularly stood out against those increases was that usage of the free streaming site Hulu.com slipped 0.6 percentage points. That’s not a precipitous decline, but in this era of increased Web video consumption, to be even flat should be worrisome.

Other datapoints confirmed the trend: Hulu.com has fallen out of comScore’s top ten video ranking, and has seen its audience slip of late, at least according to Quantcast. It may be that the decision by some of Hulu’s broadcast partners, ABC and Fox in particular, to delay when they put their content on the site has made the site less appealing.