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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...
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
Nobody wants fragmentation, they all just want their walled garden to be the only game in town.
Not exactly the world's most brilliant plan.
They don't really want their stuff on Hulu being watched on TV. Hulu is, essentially, the product of a market segmentation/price discrimination move. Better to have the tech-savvy cheapskates watching on Hulu, where we can show them ads and keep an eye on them, rather than on bittorrent or any of the numerous dodgey underground streaming outfits.
However, they don't want Hulu to replace cable as the medium of choice for nontechy/convenience oriented users. If getting a Hulu set top box is just as easy as getting a cable set top box, and costs a great deal less, then cable loses. The media overlords don't really want that.
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.
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.
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.
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
You are of course correct. The media providers similarly fought cheap distribution of movies - VHS was going to kill the movie theatre.
Then DVDs were going to kill the incredibly lucrative sale-of-movies industry (the one the MPAA didn't want) because you'll
only ever sell one copy of a movie. Except of course until HD-DVD and Bluray came out and people wanted a better copy of the same movie.
In fact bluray and HDDVD are a perfect example of something incrementally that gives more control to the media people, costs more
and doesn't offer much more to the consumer in benefit. Hence the tepid adoption. What's my point? The content providers are already
suppliers of streamed content, whether they want to acknowledge it or not, yet. Right now we have torrents (out of the control but highly
adopted), and hulu (in their control, but not as widely used). Isn't it obvious that these content providers should be working
with cable companies to form a streaming hub/spoke system so that their content is digitally packaged and forwarded? IPTV FTW, baby.
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.