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Boxee Drops Hulu Support
frdmfghtr writes "According to a boxee blog entry, Hulu will no longer be supported. From the post: 'two weeks ago Hulu called and told us their content partners were asking them to remove Hulu from boxee. we tried (many times) to plead the case for keeping Hulu on boxee, but on Friday of this week, in good faith, we will be removing it. you can see their blog post about the issues they are facing.' Reading the hulu blog post, the only 'issue' I see facing Hulu is that content providers have (once again) shot themselves in the foot, switching off a media conduit they should have been promoting." Update: 02/19 14:31 GMT by T : Jamie points out this interesting (speculative) piece at O'Reilly Radar about the thought process that may have driven the decision.
...no viewership from me for hulu. Anywhere. First tv.com now boxee. It's a sign of these illogical times that hulu allow anyone to embed their videos in any web page, but then would force a application that sends hundreds of thousands of streams of traffic to them to drop their service.
Cable companies' (who are clearly pressuring content providers) subscriptions are already falling. I'm one of those people who have dropped it. Lest that trend continue though, we can't make it TOO easy for people to watch video online now, can we? Continually making it more difficult to get to online video won't save the cable companies' bloated overpriced businesses. It may well sacrifice hulu's, though...
$buzzword1 won't be supporting $buzzword2
My...God...have we learned nothing from the late 90's PointCast/FireDog/CatFucker catastrophes?
One of the major drawbacks to Hulu, as well as other endeavors by the entertainment companies, is the fragmentation they are creating. Each of these services is an archipelago designed to serve up the the products of its masters which just makes it less useful for potential customers. It is a bit like requiring a different TV set for watching each producer's products, placing a much greater burden on the customer to hunt down where to find what the want. It is exactly the opposite of the type of aggregation that iTunes and cable and satellite networks provide.
PS->This is sm62704 posting as AC to avoid the nasty karma do-dads of that most hurting kind to power nine-thousssaaandd!
would seem be for Hulu to provide a link or three at the bottom of that notice saying "if you disagree with this, we suggest you have your voice heard by .... " with links, phone numbers, email addresses, mailboxes, etc. If the "content providers" aren't listening to Hulu (or boxee) then maybe they'll listen to mobs of their customers?
I'm very surprised they didn't do this.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I watch Hulu on XBMC. It just hooks into the video stream directly. The ads on the website are inserted by the flash player. No flash, no ads. This is probably behind this decision.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Content providers trying to prevent change from occurring?? That is shocking!! Shocking I tell you...
With the traditional players now imploding due to reduced of marketing dollar flows, I think it is only a matter of time before these players that the good old days are gone..
Control=$
That's why DRM exists.
That's why "fair use" is "bad".
and by a stretch, that why we have the war on drugs. You wouldn't want cheap antidepressants or cancer drugs (like Cannabis), now would you ?
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
if hulu are asking to be removed, then it sounds like hulu have stopped supporting boxee, rather than boxee no longer supporting hulu
Well if you'd stop visiting that cancer filled shithole you wouldn't see any posts about her.
Since I'm not in the US and can't see Hulu, I'm not missing a thing - in fact, this makes Boxee even more attractive to me now that a lot of the videos I click on won't block me.
I guess I have to thank Hulu for denying Boxee access.
All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
I just installed boxee on my Apple TV last weekend exclusively for watching Hulu. This whole thing doesn't make much sense -- saying "we don't want our tv shows being watched on a tv."
What would honestly make the most sense, in my mind, is if the network that owned the rights to shows just had them stream from their own sites. Your media box could even call them something crazy, like "channels."
Whale
It is obvious that the best path to maximize its user uptake is to make Hulu an OSS project. With the experience, dedication and level-headness of the millions of developers in the open source community, it will be certain that Hulu would achieve new heights.
Hulu could incorporate new functionality such as streaming MIDI files, Ogg visualation routines, Excel macro optimizations, and banner ad removal for Chrome and Firefox. Perhaps using the GPL v3 as the basic licensing framework would also provide us with the support of Bruce Perens and Bruce Schneier (not related).
Only when we focus our efforts in media content delivery engines can we wrest control of the net neutrality paradigm from DoubleClick.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Is that this video thing that doesn't work in Europe?
Meh, I'll just use Youtube like before.
when you're just starting out trying to get your content out there, you post it practically everywhere to get exposure.
At what point of growth do you go "fuck this small player" - I just don't understand. In the content industry you need as much exposure as you can get. Even if something comes along that's new and small, it's still a content delivery system so why not put your content on it?
Can anyone explain to me the mentality here? Anyone?
In a shocking twist, Mknnnr was also found to have backstabbed Hoolihooli in a deal with Farnanook.
In unrelated news, it has been found that 98% of "Web 2.0" business names are created by cats walking on keyboards. Footage at 11.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
When will they ever get it? Commercials, no commercials, I'm not sitting in front of the computer to watch something longer than 5 minutes in duration. They need Hulu in my living room if they think I will ever care even a little bit about Hulu.
Think Deeply.
Anybody know of a way to save a Hulu video stream in Linux? With or without the ads? I'd love to watch Hulu on my media extender, which plays .flv videos just fine, but has no web browser.
I guess it's back to the torrent channel for me and thee, then, innit? So instead of watching SOME ads, ye and me will watch a-none, with nary a soul venturing out ter get screwed again! Tis so brilliant a move it could have only come from NBC/Universal! Those bleeding rotters only know how to lose money naught how ter be making it, so me boys will ignore th fools and hoist ye jolly roger we will...
See ye and thee at th' bay laddies!
--bornagainpenguin
Have a Virgin Mobile USA smartphone? Give VMRoms.com a try!
Those "content providers" are afraid of losing control in this risky new venture. By playing it safe they keep their control on known revenue sources. They don't want to take a chance on an unknown thing that could hurt a known revenue source.
And what would Boxee be, pray tell? I went to the site, and all I see is a page that asks me to log in. No information on what Boxee would be - no "What is Boxee?" or "Information about Boxee" or "Why you should give a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys about Boxee".
It looks to me like the standard Web 2.0 "We are so tragically hip that we cannot see over our own pelvis, and if you don't know what we are by osmosis, then you are so terribly uncool we wouldn't want to deal with you anyway."
Then there's the little issue of the Boxee blog not having a link back to the main site - good web site design there guys. Yes, *I* know to edit the URL to get to the main site, but amazingly enough guys, there are people in this world who don't know that little trick (though I suppose they, too, fall into the "terribly uncool" group which with you would rather not be bothered).
And of course, neither the story submitter nor the <cough>editors[sic]<cough> could be bothered to actually link to any such explanation.
Oh well - my guess is that whatever Boxee is, it will follow the same trajectory most Web 2.0 objects follow, so perhaps when the inevitable "Boxee goes bust" story is posted on /. that may give some clues as to what the remains used to be.
www.eFax.com are spammers
...if they do not, folks who do not like the changes can simply abandon Hulu.com for other avenues.
Honestly, I'm hard-pressed to find anything worth the hassle on the site anyway, though tastes obviously differ.
It's obvious that (unlike the music industry) the TV industry is at least trying to adapt to the web. That said, the time is pretty ripe for a hungry start-up or a bored zillionaire to start providing Internet-only broadcasting in a way that appeals, with shows that entertain.
The economy doesn't have to get in the way either - FOX got its start back during the last recession (late '80s, early '90s), no? Why can't the same thing happen now? (Hell, if it's entertaining enough, who needs cable/satellite? That would be enough to both push the traditional media along, and at the same time show if/how it can be profitable).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The reason why we have this rampant piracy is that the studios and content creators and rights holders refuse to adopt models that cater to the consumers. Instead the market is artificially segmented into more and more chunks (which are owned by the same few corporations) to make cash and data flow as complicated as possible to charge more and more for it. I'm really getting sick of all this political bullshit.
...
Why isn't Hulu.com available outside the US? Because they need to segment the market to sell country specific ads.
Why isn't Boxee allowed to stream Hulu content? Because they want to segment the ad market into "Hulu ads" and "Non-Hulu/Other ads"
Why do DVDs still get released with Region codes? Because they want to segment the market to sell the same stuff at different prices and make ad contracts for different regions so they can earn a manifold of income.
Why is there still no simultaneous release of movies if many people watch them with subtitles or in English anyway? Because they want to segment the market into the respective "exploitation" zones to draw money out.
Some of these things are happening because the industry wanted them, some because our stupid societies still believe they need borders and nationalities to function and thus establish different tax systems. It could all be so easy if you would only let it get more complicated
Until this is resolved I'm at the Pirate Bay, watching KingKong, sipping Cider and laughing at all those idiots that still bother to screw around with that antiquated segmentation.
http://www.hulu.com/videos/search?query=contact
No it doesn't bring up a contact page, but scroll to the bottom and there's a little link "Didn't find what you wanted? Click here to let us know" which pops up a contact box.... use it to let them know how you feel.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I haven't seen it mentioned yet, but there is also a plugin that has been made for Windows Media Center that uses Hulu. The site is: secondrun.tv and right now it is definitely beta, but it does work and I believe would be something the "suits" would also be opposed to. How many have thought, "With Hulu and a WMC / Boxee solution, I can cancel my cable/satalite bill"?! I am currently one of those getting ready to put an old school antenna back up and start using those airwaves again, in conjunction with my window media center!
We need to let the people who really pay for TV shows know how we want our content.
A lot of people think that the cable/sat subscribers are whom pay, but they would be wrong.
We need to start letting advertisers know, that we want our content "free", as they are the ones that truly pay for the shows.
You insensitive clod, I watch Hulu on my TV via Boxee... that's the whole point.
Fringe, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, Eureka, Psych, Monk, Burn Notice, Damages, Lie to Me.. all on Hulu - plus Nova, Nasa TV, the Daily Show, SNL - all on Hulu.
I don't have to pay an extra $50 / month for cable/sat - just my internet connection.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
After reading that speculative piece over at O'Reilly, I really have to wonder exactly how their business model works. I know the networks hate DVR, but they have more or less come to accept it as long as you watch the commercials. What I fail to see is why they would be against watching a lower quality version at a later point with current commercials as opposed to watching a DVR'd version at a later point with potentially outdated commercials.
I think Hulu is great for when I miss a show but if I am around I'd prefer to watch the HD version on TV. I am probably not your typical customer as I maybe watch an hour or two of TV a week - but those are shows I truely enjoy. I know this move will make a lot of people return to downloading the commercial-free torrent to watch on their TV, but for me I am just apt to not watch if I miss something. Torrents are not complicated, but take more forethought and time than I am usually willing to invest in finding a TV show. Hopefully someday they'll realize that there are many different types of consumers and markets out there that they could be attracting instead of repelling them.
Without their content, none of what Hulu does would be possible, including providing you content via Hulu.com and our many distribution partner websites.
The above quote is from the Hulu Blog. The Their is obviously the "content providers", AKA the losers.
I can watch TikiBar, and wish it were more than 5 minutes long. I was about to Boxee my Apple TV for Hulu. But frankly I'm fine with free video podcasts, TikiBar, TED Talks, NASA, etc.
Think Deeply.
Until this is resolved I'm at the Pirate Bay, watching KingKong, sipping Cider and laughing at all those idiots that still bother to screw around with that antiquated segmentation.
Ah, the legendary KingKong defense...
Ugh, this reminds me of how the networks pressured NetFlix into killing their Red Envelope independent publishing division. Every time I see something like this, I lose some of the hope that new, more open distribution models will win out over industry inertia.
I don't know who you are A.C. but you are clearly a Racist, and at that, you resemble a Neo-Nazi.
Five words describe me on a normal day. two words describe me the rest of the time. can you guess?
Right now Hulu's in the place that Apple was with music a few years ago. Apple dragged the labels kicking and screaming into the internet age and showed them that there was a better way than blindly fighting everyone on the internet. Hulu's trying to do the same thing with the studios.
Considering Boxee isn't even a real product (vaporware)... it's kind of hard to get my panties in a twist over this.
Maybe if Boxee ever makes it into, ya know, the reality-based world, it can raise up to the level of something to be concerned about. As it stands, it's like getting mad that I can't watch Hulu on my Infinium Labs Phantom.
Hmm... there's a mistake in the radar.oreilly article. It was pretty jarring to read it, it concerns Divx. The author has confused Divx Discs with Self-Destruct DVDs that rot when exposed to air. I mean they are both bad technologies, and arguably are intended to acheive the same goal, but they are still different.
Divx was a complicated technology that was designed to lock out Divx discs from playing in certain circumstances. For instance, you "buy" a Divx DVD for the cheapest price available, and then you are locked out of watching it again until you "buy" it again. Or you get the "Gold Divx" subscription (not available for all Divx Discs), and you can theoretically watch the disk an unlimited number of times... on the particular Divx player you had the Gold subscription for that particular Divx disk on.
As Penny Arcade thoughtfully pointed out, Divx disks were hewn cold from the bones of the stillborn. They were thought up by Satan, Disney, some entertainment industry lawyers, and Circuit City where service is state of the art. (Rot in Hell, Circuit City!)
The concept behind Divx hasn't gone away, but nowadays it's more likely to be applied to video games. This is because just as Divx was supposed to eliminate the very concept of first sale and used DVDs, you now hear video game companies whining about the used video game market. (They'll get a wakeup call soon though, their industry isn't as recession proof as they thought and the used video game market will soon be the least of their worries.)
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
That kinda blows...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Hulu.com is a joint venture between NBC and Fox. So the "content providers" is code name for "the people who own and pay me". So the hulu guys saying, "we feel real bad about this" is BS.
If you remember this, ESPN's Play To Make ISPs Pay, you might start to understand what's going on here. The content providers want to get paid to have their content on the internet. They are trying use the same cable/satellite business model with ISP's. How else can the make someone buy unpopular content Y when they want to show their popular content X. It's about greed on the content providers end. They have no control if us people can watch whatever they want, whenever they want to.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
Uh? I've been using boxee for about 6 months. Not vaporware. Didn't even get a private invite. Signed up at the site, a week later got the invite. Oh wait -- are you a windows user? That must be the issue. Linux and mac have had boxee for a long time.
What is Hulu? Its a domestic US TV content company, this isnt news outside country code +1.
AG
I guess I simply won't be upgrading anytime soon. :(
Boxee is great for pulling my TV shows & Movies ripped from my DVD collection off of my NAS, but I can't tell you how many times I've had people over and just found something on Hulu to watch, like the latest episode of 30 Rock or American Dad. This move kills one of the biggest reasons to use boxee for me.
There are loads of bugs in it that I want fixed, but if there's no more hulu, then what's the point?
Boxxy is our queen
Boxxy is our queen
Boxxy is our queen
Why is it that in most industries, the people who make the product are very seldom the ones who distribute it, but in entertainment, the companies involved are almost always the same. For instance: name me one television production studio in the US whose shows you like to watch... you can't because the shows are all produced by the distribution networks themselves. I think that's part of the problem, with TV and Movies even more than music, the content creators/owners are all tied up with the distribution model, and that means that content is at the mercy of the stupidity of network scheduling, time slots, etc. Ans what about the artificial hype/limitations put on movies because the studio decided how many screens they wanted it on, based on the percieved "size" of the film. Where are the market forces in that equation? New films stay in theaters so briefly that their success is more due to "marketing" than "market". It galls me that we have 30-screen megaplexes, and yet they show the same crappy "blockbuster" on 8 screens, just because it was predicted to be good, and other movies get whisked away after just 2 weeks. Seems like with all those screens (we have more movie screens now in the US than we ever have had, I think I read), we would be able to run a movie long enough so that word of mouth would have time to work. I blame these problems on the close tie between content creation/ownership and distribution. The tail (which is as healthy as ever) is wagging the dog (which is beginning to look mangy and fleabitten). Tails come in many shapes and sizes, perhaps we'd rather have a cat, or a llama. The whole entertainment industry needs to figure out that they are in the business of entertaining people, and figure out how to make that profitable, in stead of being int he profit businees, and trying to keep it moderately entertaining.
Hi, I'm here to serve notice: rectal cancer is suing for defamation.
Blank until
I just went and canceled my hulu account and emailed them why. I imagine their advertising revenue depends on those accounts, so anyone who has an account on hulu - get out there and cancel it! Let them know why also: feedback@hulu.com
I'm not a Boxee user, but I happily watch Hulu content on my Mac, via Front Row no less, using the Understudy plug-in. It works perfectly well, and gives me Mac remote access to my playlists and the updated RSS streams for my favorite shows. Works great with Netflix too. Boxee? Meh.
I guess I am missing something, but Boxee is ultimately software, right?
So why can't the Boxee people program their software to look like a regular web browser on a regular computer to Hulu's servers, making Boxee indistinguishable to those providers who would care?
Sort of like a User Agent Switcher for a media player? It seems to me that would be a big "FU" to the content providers, a big win for viewers, and Hulu is left out of the loop altogether so they're not to blame.
The reason why we have this rampant piracy is that the studios and content creators and rights holders refuse to adopt models that cater to the consumers. Instead the market is artificially segmented into more and more chunks (which are owned by the same few corporations) to make cash and data flow as complicated as possible to charge more and more for it. I'm really getting sick of all this political bullshit.
Why isn't Hulu.com available outside the US? Because they need to segment the market to sell country specific ads.
Why isn't Boxee allowed to stream Hulu content?
Because they want to segment the ad market into "Hulu ads" and "Non-Hulu/Other ads"
Why do DVDs still get released with Region codes?
Because they want to segment the market to sell the same stuff at different prices and make ad contracts for different regions so they can earn a manifold of income.
Why is there still no simultaneous release of movies if many people watch them with subtitles or in English anyway? Because they want to segment the market into the respective "exploitation" zones to draw money out.
Some of these things are happening because the industry wanted them, some because our stupid societies still believe they need borders and nationalities to function and thus establish different tax systems. It could all be so easy if you would only let it get more complicated ...
Until this is resolved I'm at the Pirate Bay, watching KingKong, sipping Cider and laughing at all those idiots that still bother to screw around with that antiquated segmentation.
"Why isn't Hulu.com available outside the US? Because they need to segment the market to sell country specific ads."
They also should ensure that the adds are legal where they are being broadcasted. For example, it is illegal to target publicity to children in many countries, but not in the US, publicity on medication must mention the side-effects in the US, but not necessarily in other countries.
Internet publicity is still legally uncharted territory and content providers probably don't want to risk a lawsuit...
In the beginning a medium amount of people know about Hulu, an even smaller amount of people know about Boxee.
Then a minute long add with Alec Baldwin shows up in the middle of the superbowl telling people that they can watch most of their programs anytime they want too through a website called Hulu.
Now a lot of people now know about Hulu, and think that this is nice but They'd rather watch it on my television. They start looking into other ways to do this and now more people know about Boxee.
Now the content providers notice they are losing viewer share to themselves, and force Hulu to stop Boxee from taking their TV viewer share.
Calvin:Do you believe in the devil? Hobbes:I'm not sure man needs the help.
I prefer the Chewbacca defense
They are killing all competition so their box will be the only way to watch HULU on TV.
Half of writing history is hiding the truth.
Available in alpha for the MacIntel, Apple TV and Linux.
The invitation-only alpha for Windows was only released last month.
Boxee is obscure. Boxee is in development. It can't play protected content. The software isn't even available to over ninety percent of the market.
In its current state it is not a threat to Hulu or anyone else.
Boxee does not currently support hardware video decoding, the entire load of the video decoding process is handled by the system's CPU which means that users need, by today's standards, a very powerful CPU to decode native 1080p videos encoded with a modern video codec like H.264.
> Every time I see something like this, I lose some of the hope that new, more open distribution models will win out over industry inertia.
Oh, open distribution models will still win.
But the only surviving "open distribution model" will be straight-up piracy if they keep killing all the nifty things people come up with.
The thing I find amusing about this, is that they are stopping people now that they have gotten used to it. It will drive the more savvy to look around online for other options. And they will find things like bittorrent.
So they are driving people to the "illegal" ways of getting the exact same thing. And people are now less likely to see a moral problem with doing so since they were doing it with hulu just till they broke it. So now they get zero revenue from it, and people are still watching the shows from online sources. With the current software out there for automating the downloads, it's even better than Hulu for a lot of things. And you can get the shows in HD! Much of the stuff is easy enough for even my parents to use.
Hulu has a forum area with a section on devices. A "Boxee" thread has already been started for the purpose of asking Hulu to not block Boxee.
Hulu > Discussions > Device Support Request
If you're as upset about this as I am, it wouldn't hurt to let Hulu know.
This post approved by Shampoo.
wtf is hulu?
Perhaps Hulu is considering a channel on Roku and sees other similar things as a threat to this model.
nt
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
This is totally assinine.
This is content with embedded commercials. It's essentially a normal TV
broacast. There aren't even any good navigation features in their player.
What possible harm could there be in Boxee essentially being an "alternate
web browser".
Hulu is lame enough without them working to make sure you can't watch
this stuff on a proper TV.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The Linux version of Boxee is sitting on the desktop machine I'm typing right now.
Another copy is sitting on one of my MythTV frontend boxes. Other guys are
happily using it like any other MythTV plugin. I am sure there are MCE users
doing the same (assuming MCE supports that sort of thing).
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Four letters: D.M.C.A.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
So has Windows. If you know how to get movies from a torrent, you can get Boxee for Windows from a torrent as well.
Boxee consolidates the indefinite number of online content services into a single viewing experience. Kind of the best of all worlds, the content providers get to try and make their own walled gardens but the users get a simplified experience. So Hulu decides no, that's not good enough. We want to force everyone to buy our hardware too, so they can pay $$ for the hardware to watch our "free" service on their teevees.
Yeah, no.
Or maybe Hulu's goal is to keep people using a crappy web browser experience on their computer display while the 60" flat screen HDTV across the room sits dark.
Hoosegow Drops eWee Support
Spoobomb Drops YurtCup Support
BlueFart Drops HashBang Support
ClamBone Drops Goo4U Support
KumBayAh Drops HoHoHo Support
FlikBugr Drops DingleBerry Support
HALpal Drops BeBopOs Support
Will it never end?
Edith Keeler Must Die
Boxee produces open source software with a commercial tie-in. Those kinds of projects tend to be vulnerable to pressures like this. Boxee needs to play nice with the content providers and Hulu or else all their channels will close.
An independent open source project could have just told Hulu to go and fsck themselves.
It is the fact that you can hook boxee to your TV that has caused hulu to be removed. It is the TV stations and cable companies that are applying pressure. Neither hulu nor boxee want to be divorced.
Why bother
Vaporware? Really? We dropped cable at our house for Boxee a few months ago...
I dont see anything wrong with their choice. This is what the content providers want and Hulu really needs to play by their rules if they want to stay legit.
They are in a good position right now. They give people what they are wanting (people that would probably be downloading a torrent otherwise) and seem to have made the content providers happy so far, allowing them a broader array of media than they would have without. (well if they didnt want to deal with messy legal matters at some point).
I dont see why everyone is complaining, its their choice and Hulu chose, its the same choice I would make in their position...
How do you suddenly drop support for a popular feature from an open source project? Yeah, you can discontinue ongoing development if you want, but the current feature is out there, and presumably working. All someone has to do is create a Hulu patch for Boxee or fork Boxee entirely. Boxee is written by a company that probably wants to make a profit and not dump it into a litigation black hole, but the community doesn't care and can route around this with minimal effort (beyond confusion, which I hate).
How does vapourware apply to Boxee? It is a real product, with real support, run by who knows how many users? Try to do a little research next time before proving to all us readers just how ill-informed you are.
May have stated this before, but I am adding to the ammo canister for Hulu vs the Content Providers.
We want our entertainment. We want it when we want it. We want to be able to retrieve it easily. Now the we here I speak of is my family, but I have a funny feeling that many other tech savvy types are very very similar.
Hulu is great, why? Because it has a huge achieve of shows that I have loved from the 80s when I grew up to recently ran shows. I can watch them anywhere if I need. It is great to have this access in my office or on the road. But here is the thing, I DO NOT want to be restricted to a 15 inch or 22 inch screen at home. I have a blessed plasma HDTV in my living room for view media. I want to be in my La-Z-Boy with a beer in hand. Yup, I am the tech savvy joe public type.
So I have cable service but I rarely watch at the times shows are on. Why? Because I am busy. I am a father, a husband and have two businesses. I have a DVR in house. (MythTV if you care to know) I have this DVR record from the cable and from over the air content. Guess what, this DVR has the ability to strip commercials from the shows.
Now on this DVR (a full fledge computer) I have Boxee. Boxee is a god sent to me. Why? Because I can use my remote in my La-Z-Boy to pull up my content on my 42 screen. And guess what, when watching Hulu on through Boxee it is really no different than watching it with Firefox or Internet Explorer or any other browser. When I watch Hulu, the media is full screened, nothing but the media is showing.
But here is the difference. I watch commercials with Hulu delivered through Boxee. Because they are there. I don't mind commercials. Hell, commercials done well and well placed can be fun. I understand commercials help bring around my entertainment. I am ok with that, but please, vary the commercials, make them fun, make them worth my eyes.
But now Boxee has played nice, because Hulu took their ball and went home. Because content providers didn't like that new kid over there playing with the ball? Hey News Corp, NBC/Universal? Are you children that cannot share within reason? Hulu is a nice free to me with limited use of commercials legit way for me to view the entertainment. What I use to view Hulu shouldn't be your concern. Because us geeks, we will always find ways. It is our Standard Operating Procedure.
Right now, since I am the La-Z-Boy type, I can just have my DVR get the shows, have it strip the commercials. Then there is that other way of the Internet, downloading of shows from a non legit source. And I have been told, that normally the non legit sources have the commercials removed too.
The under 40 crowd is quickly becoming an On Demand culture. And it isn't so much that I want something now now now. It is more we want something when we want it. We like to watch a season's worth of TV in a couple weekend from a DVD collection or from a collected season on a DVR. We don't live in a world where we can give up 8 to 11 every night (yes eastern time zone for me) for shows. Sometimes we need to watch shows at 1 am or from 11 to 4 on a Saturday (good replacement for the non sport type.) This is who we are. We are quickly becoming your main demographic. Do not limit us unfairly. We do not forget. But if we do forget, we are creatures of habit. And right now, I am going to be less in the habit of watching content through Hulu. Less eyes on your commercial support.
Here is my suggest for you content providers for the future. Figure out how to use the Internet to deliver your content. Figure out a way to deliver the content in the most simple of methods. Do not worry about how the content in the end is viewed. Because you cannot keep up with the technology, TV to iPod to laptops to netbooks to computers in the kitchen. Make it simple, so simple, no one will want to put the effort into pirating. You want money. You need us to make the money. We want your content. But don't limit us on how we are meant
CaptAngryPants aka Eric
http://rustmedia.tv
There is actually a decent solution to all of this. Hulu needs to resell their streams.
Do the content providers care about a specific advertisement being shown with their shows? No. They care about getting 25 or 50 cents or however much money they receive each time someone watches their show.
They simply need to set up an API so that a trusted third party can instruct Hulu.com to play an episode for somebody. The third party is then billed an agreed amount, and it is up to the third party to recoup that expense. They might insert commercials between segments of the show, or charge the user for access. A German company could show Hulu content to people in Germany, interspersed with ads for German products, and Hulu wouldn't need to worry about all the details.
I'm also surprised that Hulu doesn't offer their own "Hulu premium" service which would allow people to choose to pay per stream rather than view ads. They could offer that globally to anyone with a valid credit card.
I submitted a comment to the Hulu blog saying I love Hulu and know their hand was forced, but I would not watch Hulu until their "content partners" relent or they revealed which "partners" did this. I said I did this not out of protest of Hulu, but so I could ensure the "partners" who did this didn't get revenue from my advertising views.
I told them I hoped they could reveal which "partners" did this so I could return to Hulu and avoid only shows from those "partners", but I knew that was unlikely because those "partners" probably provided Hulu some of their VC.
My comment wasn't published, but there are other negative comments on the blog. I wonder which part of what I said wasn't kosher?
Crikey. I pretty much quit watching TV 30 years ago, because there wasn't anything worth watching... when I moved to the US I didn't even bother getting a TV set until after I married. Now it's online, and there still isn't anything worth watching. I've looked at hulu, and the content is the same kinds of shows I don't watch on regular TV.
So why is boxee vs hulu "news for nerds" or "stuff that matters"? Or do couch potatoes count as geeks these days?
Hopefully this pushes someone to write a Boxee bittorrent plugin. Hulu-like interface, but shows are fetched from other Boxee users via bittorrent. Win all around.
What the hell is boxee?
Why would some one name a product after an annoying BSG character?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Three words: Does not apply.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
With no Hulu on Boxee, to the Pirate Bay I go!
Boxee drops Hulu? Judging from the summary it sounds more like Hulu dropped Boxee ...
So your segment is "They produce it and you watch it without paying or viewing ads?"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
With HULU (and other legitimate ways to watch big media content online for free) on Boxee and other set-top-boxes, it gives people a lot less reason to keep paying for expensive cable/sattelite TV services. So people might drop those services or drop some of the tiers/channel options. Which is bad for the content providers (many of whom own cable providers and/or cable channels)
You are entirely correct; Hulu is rolling over for these mysterious and un-named 'content providers' (so much for a transparent culture...). But Boxee is rolling over for Hulu. It's not that Boxee can't get Hulu's feed - it's that Boxee isn't going to, because presumably that would result in forcing Hulu to respond legally, or respond technologically with some arbitrary set of bloated interlocks.
I think, as I noted above, that the real unknown here is who is forcing this move. Of course, it's a bad move, but one does wonder as to the motivation - which is effectively cloaked from the masses. That, I think, is the cardinal sin. There could be good reasons to remove support, but we have no choice now but to assume the malicious reasons.
[Ego]out
this will explain it:
http://tinyurl.com/c47wnu
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Personally I can see this working out bad for Boxee. It is currently my second favorite XBMC fork (behind the rocking Plex) and I was looking forward to make my folks a new HTPC to give them Boxee in their living room, but without Hulu Boxee is much less useful.
Personally I use Play On to stream Hulu, Netflix and the like to my Plex computer hooked up to my TV so I am not missing out, but they were excited.
Now Boxee is just a second rate XBMC with needless social networking bolted on. Personally I would much rather keep Plex (with its working surround sound support and better Apple remote integration).
Honestly though I bet someone will get Boxee back having Hulu with some sort of unofficial plugin soon. Thats what the major media companies don't understand- it doesn't matter what they want what matters is what is technically possible. If someone cool is possible to do technically someone somewhere you can buy the law will work out the solution and spread it back to the exact people the media companies think they have control over.
Disclaimer: I don't work or develop for Play On or Plex. Just giving props to amazing software.
Open Source Sushi
The reason why we have this rampant piracy is that the studios and content creators and rights holders refuse to adopt models that cater to the consumers.
The only model that will really cater to the consumers is 100% free, no advertisements, no copyright restrictions. Everything else leads to complaints about why the model isn't good enough and why pirating is rampant.
Hulu? Boxee? Who makes up this shit?
Boxee uses the adobe flash plugin for firefox already. Unfortunately, the loader application they use which interfaces between Boxee and the flash plugin is closed source. That's right: They took a completely open piece of software (XBMC) and added extras to it that were closed off. They get away with this by making it a separate app so that there's some semblance of separation. This should be a lesson to them: Close stuff off to try and get on the good side of content providers, and get screwed over. If they'd opened it up from the start, in the spirit of the codebase on which they rely, we wouldn't be in this situation, as the horse has bolted. As it is now, Boxee will likely still work with Hulu - it'll be switched off in a trivial manner from within the boxee codebase. Unfortunately, I suspect building boxee from source is a non-trivial exercise, given that it's not really an opensource project.
It's funny how you think you're really clever for figuring out how to waste your time watching awful television shows. That and thinking that it would change anything, all the reduction in advertising revenue will do is force more "product placement" style scripting until the programs themselves are merely advertisements... and you'll love them too.
Have a Brawndo on me.
"Why isn't Hulu.com available outside the US? Because they need to segment the market to sell country specific ads."
They also should ensure that the adds are legal where they are being broadcasted. For example, it is illegal to target publicity to children in many countries, but not in the US, publicity on medication must mention the side-effects in the US, but not necessarily in other countries.
Internet publicity is still legally uncharted territory and content providers probably don't want to risk a lawsuit...
Don't fool yourself, you really think this is the main reason? Simply not air these ads in question. Maybe we need a global advertisement standard or something. Sure this is complicated but it can't be much harder than producing ACTA secret treaties within democratic structures without involvement of the public. Also, this whole problem could be solved if they just let me pay a monthly fee and download all that stuff without ads. I don't respond to advertisement at all anyway so why bring that up to keep things from moving?
So your segment is "They produce it and you watch it without paying or viewing ads?"
As long as they refuse to give me a platform (which I can use) were I can pay for the content and watch it according to my terms, yeah. I'll keep watching pirated TV shows that don't run in my country if they don't sell them to me or give me any other chance of legally consuming them. It's not my choice, it's theirs. I'd pay for the shows but they won't let me. iTunes doesn't run, Hulu doesn't stream, I don't want DVDs because most stuff I watch ONCE. Give me a solution and I'll pay. Don't want to come up with a solution? Stop complaining, I'm not hurting your business anyway. If I don't want to pay and can't watch it it's the same as if I want to pay and can't do so.
The only model that will really cater to the consumers is 100% free, no advertisements, no copyright restrictions. Everything else leads to complaints about why the model isn't good enough and why pirating is rampant.
Bollocks! Who says it has to be 100% free? Cable isn't free either? Still people get it. I would gladly pay a monthly subscription fee to download DRM free content to watch on my machines. You can put it as many ads as you want but don't expect me to watch them (I change the channel or skip them anyhow). This is a bullshit claim, people WANT to pay for stuff if the service is good. I'd love to have a legal TV site with torrents. But it doesn't exist because these greedy fucks can't agree on pricing and power distribution. Until they sort it out, I'll get the best possible solution that is available right now, that it's free isn't my fault ... it's theirs for not taking advantage of that market.
Cable isn't free either? Still people get it.
Will they keep on getting it if their Internet connection offered the same stuff for free? Consider a Pirate Bay + media center setup. 100% free. No advertising.
This is a bullshit claim, people WANT to pay for stuff if the service is good.
It's debatable. There are lots of places now where you can get music on the cheap, yet still we see the rants here about how the RIAA doesn't get it, how they aren't giving the people what they want. Everybody has their own idea of how much they should pay.
That's not a bad idea.... everyone is ripping or copying media from their DVR/tuner to make available via Boxee anyways... why not just have those also go out on a P2P broadcast to other Boxee users... and download via Torrent. While at it... add in subscription to a particular show.... and channels/networks/genres to browse through. Even tagging would be nice.
Boxee supports RSS feeds with torrent links currently but you have to register them with the Boxee website... so it's a multi-step process. First go to a site like TVRSS create a search RSS feed, put it on Feedburner or similar, then login to Boxee and add it to your feeds list (or edit your feeds XML file directly), then browse via Boxee to your Video->Internet->RSS feeds, then select a feed, select a download, confirm download - wait.
Not exactly convenient until you get all your feeds set up. Once they are of course you can just do the last part, select a bunch of episodes in the morning, come home after work and enjoy that night.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
One of the reasons Boxee may well have more problems like this is that it supports BitTorrent. By doing P2P, it acts as a server on the customer's Internet connection 24x7, which is likely not only to slow the connection but to expose the user to penalty charges for exceeding caps. And it violates ISPs' terms of service as well. (That's not to mention the fact that BitTorrent is mostly used for illegal downloading. The Boxee is said only to point to "legal" trackers, but can easily be pointed at illegal ones.) Finally, most users of the Boxee are completely naive about the fact that their Internet connections are being co-opted to serve up content -- a serious disclosure issue. If it didn't do P2P, the Boxee might do a lot better.
Will they keep on getting it if their Internet connection offered the same stuff for free? Consider a Pirate Bay + media center setup. 100% free. No advertising.
Most people are still incapable of pirating non-mainstream stuff. This is exactly the point of the discussion ... why even bother with the people who will pirate anyway? People that get cable could just as well wait a few months for the stuff to air on "free" TV. We don't make road laws and automotive taxes for people that steal cars, do we? The industry (and apparently you) is refusing the idea that they could make lots of money by offering legal means of acquiring content through internet based systems like you mention. Why would you use Piratebay if it's free when it takes two weeks to download a movie because no one is seeding what you want to see? A professionally run, paid alternative with guaranteed seeding would beat that any time of the day. Like I said I'd happily pay that if it granted me fast and easy access, so far TPB is "better" than the legal ones available but that only means that the legal sites are REALLLY awful. Piratebay is a mess, ten versions of the same movie, no subtitles, no real standards.
... you don't make any money off of them anyway. Why even bother spending millions on ads if it's merely a "gamble" for revenue. Spend these millions on better infrastructure and "try something new" models were users get free stuff every now and again with their subscription. That's wayyy more effective than gambling on annoying ads.
Advertising is gambling, you can't guarantee revenue from ads. You pay people to force your images on them so their brain gets tricked into preferring that brand next time they need to make a decision. Take people like me that ignore ads completely
It's debatable. There are lots of places now where you can get music on the cheap, yet still we see the rants here about how the RIAA doesn't get it, how they aren't giving the people what they want. Everybody has their own idea of how much they should pay.
Sure it's debatable but the people that need to "debate" are the industry people and resellers. Can we agree that the customers have already made up their mind? No DRM, no shitty restrictions, no proprietary formats or software. Yet, they [the industry] simply say "we don't want to talk" and that's it then. The customers don't get a discussion or debate at all. Since there hasn't been ONE actual alternative so far we will never be able to actually zone in to a price that many people can agree on. Especially not if the people that need to lead the discussion simply refuse and ignore the customers voices. We live in a new era and that means you will have to make deals and try stuff, fall on your face, get screwed over and eventually find a model that works for most of those involved. That's the way of life. Right now the industry uses their lobby power and monopolistic stance to deny that development. This is changing right now, more painfully than it would have if they gave in and actually tried.
There will always be those that don't want to pay at all, fuck them! We need to make the improvements for people that want to take part in the economy. You don't ask a guy that steals food regularly what he would want to pay. You need to change your model and find a balance between those that steal anyway and those that want to pay but are put off by your lack of commitment. Those that don't pay at all aren't your problem because either way, you won't get their money. The industry needs to win back those that used to pay and now prefer the other models because they're not satisfied with what is offered to them anymore but for various societal reasons they can't/don't want to stop consuming media.
Most people are still incapable of pirating non-mainstream stuff. This is exactly the point of the discussion ... why even bother with the people who will pirate anyway?
Because they don't want pirating to become mainstream.
Yet, they [the industry] simply say "we don't want to talk" and that's it then.
The industry has been moving into an online direction for a long time now. It's gotten to the point where Amazon sells songs for less than a $1 in a DRM-free mp3 format. There are services that offer all-you-can eat music listening for a monthly fee. There are YouTube revenue sharing deals, there's now places like Hulu, etc.
Why would you use Piratebay if it's free when it takes two weeks to download a movie because no one is seeding what you want to see?
Competitors who do not respect copyright will drive down the price to near zero while upping the quality. They can do these because they can live well on the slim margins without having to pay to produce the content. They can also rely on people that just want to share without concerns about profit. This is the Pirate Bay model.
There will always be those that don't want to pay at all, fuck them! We need to make the improvements for people that want to take part in the economy.
I agree to an extent, but between the people who will pay because they feel it's right, and the people who will go out of their way to pirate, there is a large middle who will lean in either direction depending on the environment. If it's trivial to get free with no advertisements, then they will move in that direction.
Because they don't want pirating to become mainstream.
That is far beyond their control. They can't outlaw knowledge. Bram Cohen wasn't stopped from developing or publishing the BitTorrent protocol and the next best thing will come out just as easy. There is no way you can stop people from learning how to pirate, all you can do is fight the windmill that is illegal distribution but imho this is a meaningless effort. It costs millions of dollars that would be better spent improving your own infrastructure. That's like spending money on destroying car factories because the things drive too fast instead of fixing your roads.
The industry has been moving into an online direction for a long time now. It's gotten to the point where Amazon sells songs for less than a $1 in a DRM-free mp3 format. There are services that offer all-you-can eat music listening for a monthly fee. There are YouTube revenue sharing deals, there's now places like Hulu, etc.
Great, from an American perspective that's all nice and well but from my view as a European Linux user I have exactly 0 benefit from that. Amazon doesn't sell here, Hulu doesn't stream in my country (just like most other online services), Youtube is not worth paying for in any case and please show me the "all you can eat" music services that sell the kind of music I want (exotic stuff). I can see your arguments but from a global perspective that's not even enough to cover half the iceberg's tip.
Competitors who do not respect copyright will drive down the price to near zero while upping the quality. They can do these because they can live well on the slim margins without having to pay to produce the content. They can also rely on people that just want to share without concerns about profit. This is the Pirate Bay model.
There is no Pirate Bay model, you are referring to competing business models but Pirate bay isn't a business. It's a semi-legal loophole that happens to enable people to get stuff for free that they'd otherwise had to pay for. If the quality and portfolio of the legal models would live up (or even get somewhere near) what is available through piracy channels then you'd probably see a drop in these illegal activities. I use pirate sites because the DVDs I want aren't sold in my country or not at all (or as rare collectors items for $50+), the music I want isn't available or has DRM. If Pirate Bay was a place that made money by selling other people's work I would agree with your statement but since they just enable people to give each other free stuff that's not a business in any stretch of the imagination.
I agree to an extent, but between the people who will pay because they feel it's right, and the people who will go out of their way to pirate, there is a large middle who will lean in either direction depending on the environment. If it's trivial to get free with no advertisements, then they will move in that direction.
Well then you'll have to come up with other things that make them want to pay and can't be copied. That's what people like me have been demanding for quite some time now. Let musicians make money by playing Gigs and travelling around. Music and Movies can be free, you just have to sell people enough other stuff to finance it. If you think about it the whole business is run on a "we pay up front anyway" notion. And you can see that innovative investments aren't done, not because of piracy but because the people that put up that kind of money nowadays expect to get more money back. The "we do stuff just to do it and promote ourselves" is almost gone from the big media. That's a development that has been going on long before the elaborate digital "piracy" was even around. It's a consequence of culture turning into an industrialized business with exponential endless growth. That is wrong and can never work, in fact, I'm surprised that it has worked for so long. Some people
Pirate bay isn't a business
I bet they are. They receive a lot of money in advertising dollars. There have been stories about offshore accounts and unpaid taxes. They have never released detailed financial statements. Instead, they have made vague claims about operating expenses and how they aren't in it for the money. Perhaps an unbiased article in English will appear summarizing the key points as they appear in the trial.
I bet they are. They receive a lot of money in advertising dollars. There have been stories about offshore accounts and unpaid taxes. They have never released detailed financial statements. Instead, they have made vague claims about operating expenses and how they aren't in it for the money. Perhaps an unbiased article in English will appear summarizing the key points as they appear in the trial.
Well, I've been wondering about that too to be quite honest. I expected them to come out during the early stages of the trials and slap some accounting data on the table what the actual server cost is and what the ad revenue brings them. I still don't think they can get rich by doing that. Even if it's run for profit gain that is a really shitty business model. They have an awful lot of hardware to maintain. Bandwidth can't be too hard since the torrent files all range from 10-50KBs each and even if you have to shove out millions of those you won't get anywhere near what file distributors have to pay for. It would certainly be interesting to get some more detailed info on what's actually going on. But hey, the trial is still young. Let's wait and see.