Slashdot Mirror
Hulu Launches With Few YouTube Killing Qualities
Hulu.com, the online video venture from NBC Universal and News Corp., has launched a private beta program. Early reports suggest it's far from being a YouTube killer. "Although Hulu's parent companies have done a lot of things right with the service, the scheduling leaves something to be desired. For the time being, the site will only feature five weeks worth of content for any given show. From there, it's assumed that older content will get the boot in favor of newer episodes and movies. This isn't necessarily a deal breaker for us, but for a lot of viewers this will prevent the service from becoming with online video Shangri-La they'd imagined. Furthermore, with the lack of user-generated content, it falls short of the end-all be-all site for online video. Viewers are still going to go to YouTube and still click their ads -- but in terms of piracy a minor rebellion may have been quelled."
Actually this service has little to do with YouTube, and doesn't risk to kill it, since Hulu and YouTube are actually complementary. YouTube serves user-submitted content and no shows, and Hulu serves no user-submitted content and nothing but shows. So actually it has little to do with YouTube, it's just a free web-based VoD service, I guess. Sorry if I'm stating the obvious, but that's just no YouTube killer at all.
You just got troll'd!
If it can't kill YouTube, can it at least kill the mouth-breathing YouTube comments? I would also settle for just killing the comments at the source.
To me, it's an entirely different question.
Can I watch it on my television?
I think it's really weird that Amazon.com, Hulu, Netflix, and so many others think that I watch television on my computer. I don't. I watch television on... well, I watch it on my television.
Now, I know, some of you have fancy media PCs set up so that you can watch television on your computer on your television, and if you do, congratulations, sounds like you've got a nice setup. But the vast majority of people don't.
A while back, I bought one of the AppleTV boxes. Know why? So that I can watch television on my television, not on my computer. So now, I buy shows from iTunes. I've also been known to rent a movie or two on my Xbox 360, which is also hooked up to... well, you already know what it's hooked up to, right?
So to NBC, and to anyone else who wants me to watch their stuff, unless it's short clips that are posted on sites like YouTube, it doesn't matter how great the quality your programming is, it doesn't matter how simple it is to download and watch it on my computer. If you can't give me a relatively simple way to watch it on my television, I'm not going to be watching it. Period, end of story.
By the way, that's one of the things that would be so hypothetically great about downloading torrents of movies and/or television shows, if I participated in such illegal activities. With a few button presses, I could have a DVD copy of anything I download to watch at my leisure... ON MY TELEVISION!
Come back when shows on Hulu can be watched on an AppleTV, or when you're willing to let me burn a copy to DVD. Maybe then, we'll talk. (Somehow, I kind of doubt we'll be talking anytime soon.)
Now mod me up, dammit, that's one of my better rants, and something painfully obvious that I don't see discussed very often in these threads.