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."
... is NBC trying to create a "Youtube Killer" ?
... but if all NBC is trying to do is offer their recent tv shows online then it sounds like NBC is doing exactly what they set out to. Did NBC ever mention trying to compete with Youtube ? I thought they just didn't want random people uploading random content that NBC owns the copyright to on Youtube. Not trying to steal the "market" or something.
I thought they were just trying to provide a service where you can get their videos through a medium that they control ?
Also, (while I didn't RTFA), if they provide full length episodes in a single stream then they do offer something over Youtube. While I can often find complete episodes on youtube they need to be broken up in to 10 minute clips and sometimes you find the first 10 minutes and then can't find the rest of the episode and that's really annoying.
From the summary it sounds like their major "gripe" (for lack of a better word) is the lack of user generated content and only fresh episodes
I can only hope, that somewhere on their intranet, they've got a subdomain called ct. Please please please make it so if anyone reading this has the power.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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.