The Hulu Experiment was working..
Hulu was set up by a consortium of networks in the US (NBC, News Corp/Fox, and Disney/ABC) as a safe haven for their content on the web. They want to get consumers into a YouTube-like destination for "official" video content. Viewing is free, but ad-supported. And it's working well as the second most popular video destination on the web. We still can't see it here because of geo-blocking.
But now..
There is a pending merger of Comcast (the US's biggest cable TV company) and NBC/Universal. This complicates things, because Comcast is promoting it's own safe-haven called TV Everywhere, with a different business model.
TV Everywhere will be available only to cable subscribers.
It's a shell game..
So to avoid having NBC programming in two different places - one free and one subscription-based, Comcast will put pressure on Hulu to get behind its paywall.
Put that together with Viacom's recent removal of two of it's most popular shows from Hulu (The Colbert Report and The Daily Show) and both NBC and Comcast refusal to guarantee that current or future TV shows will be available for free online and the Hulu experiment is looking like it was too successful for its own good.
Which leaves content creators..where?
To me this smacks of the Ok Go schemozzzle, where a corporation worries that their content is becoming too available and tries to stuff the genie back in the bottle. In the short term, this leaves the consumer confused about where to get their favourite flavour of content for the lowest cost and the content creator worried about the best place to monetise their product.

The reality is that all forms of content will appear in multiple destinations with different business models wrapped around them.These latest ructions in the US seem like whistling past the graveyard.