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ABC/Disney Considering Hulu
An anonymous reader writes "The Walt Disney Co and Hulu.com have restarted talks over offering shows from Disney's ABC television network on the online video distributor owned by NBC Universal and News Corp, paidContent.org reported on Friday, citing unnamed sources." The real question to me is when will they stop screwing around with Boxee users?
The problem with an online model is that it may or may not be possible to block the ads. When watching television, you see what you see, unless you flip the channel. Online, though, maybe or maybe not, with some streaming sites, blocking certain sites will potentially block the ads.
But, that's what they get when they have separate files from the show, as opposed to merging it into one long video file.
ABC can't seem to keep their stuff together with their video client. the volume button is autistic, and the continue feature in which you are forced to hit a button to acknowledge that you watched their ad is recognized as a clickjack by modern browsers.
They don't need HULU they need decent software.
Is have a company/service like Hulu partner with any one (or more) of the current carriers to provide a monthly subscription to all the Hulu content, free of ads.
The future is streaming, fat-trimmed, on-demand and à la carte. There is no room for the current bloated model of "everything and the kitchen sink" cable/satellite tv.
Who suffers: local access, religious channels and basically everything that barely got watched anyway. But they can move to a cheaper online broadcast for their current audiences anyway, or be part of the à la carte.
Who benefits: The consumer and ground-floor investors in this paradigm shift.
Hulu is about turning your brain into a rich mush for the benefit of aliens, err, advertisers.
Boxee bypasses much of the advertisement and branding structure, so its not in Hulu's incentive to play nice with Boxee.
Especially since Boxee is just the mac users (10% of the market) and linux (1%).
Test your net with Netalyzr
So I still don't care what they do or not.
I don't think it's any mystery why Hulu is "screwing around with" Boxee users: Hulu's content providers don't want Hulu to be viewable on a TV and, thus (in their sad confused minds) compete with their television programming. Yes, it's stupid, but I don't see how this is Hulu's fault. They're getting jerked around by the content providers just like the rest of us.
caritj.org
Am I the only one who thinks that Hulu is such a disorganized mess? If you don't know exactly what you are looking for, forget it!
This is only marginally related (and maybe not even that). I get over the air digital content on my HD tv. I refuse to pay the monthly fees to get cable or satellite. I remember people complaining that the broadcast networks got huge chunks of air space when they started broadcasting in digital. Our PBS station broadcasts 5 different channels. Why don't the commercial networks broadcast some quality programming on their excess capacity? ABC could broadcast ESPN over the air - but they don't. It seems like you would pick up additional viewers at not much cost if you already own the broadcast frequencies. Does anyone know why they don't do this?
The problem has always been the ABC shows I like, such as Lost. They won't work under Linux, so I have a VirtualBox image that I use for those shows. It's a crappy workaround. Adding ABC to Hulu would allow me to completely get rid of that VirtualBox image.
Regardless of the current situation between Hulu and Boxee, Hulu has allowed me to get rid of my $100-plus a month cable bill, so adding any major network is a good thing.
What they need is a method whereby you can enter what what you want and a list of matching entries shows up automatically.
I call it... the locator rectangle.
mmm boxxy
Honestly, why should any of this matter to me. Hulu is yet another middleman between content and consumer. They're here solely to hustle a buck in exchange for burning my retina with adverts that I honestly don't want to see. They're going to be a flash in the pan. Sooner or later, someone is going to come up with a better model to get me content I WANT to see without forcing me to wade through shit I've made it clear I don't want to be bothered with.
Why is Boxee the real question? I'd never even heard of it until they got blocked by Hulu, I don't know anyone who has one, and nobody I know is even thinking of getting one. Sure it was a lousy decision, but is it really so world-changingly lousy that Slashdot CANNOT EVER post about Hulu without bringing Boxee up?
I for one would applaud ABC moving their shows to Hulu, as their current system (haven't bothered to check what they're using) doesn't work in Linux. Hulu does.
As a matter of fact, I've sent feedback on their video site telling them that, since they won't support my computer, I'm going to watch shows from someone who does.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Hulu is funded through advertising. On the radio a few weeks ago, I think on NPR's marketplace, http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/03/12/hulu/ they had an interview with Eric Feng, founder of Hulu. In it, he said that advertising is where the money is and that it is likely that the amount of commercials/ads shown per episode is likely to increase. It was either him or someone else on the program (I can't listen to the program right now) that said Hulu is likely to follow the same path as cable did - starting with very little commercials, and using that as a selling point, and then eventually transitioning to 7+ minutes of advertising per half hour as Hulu became indispensable.
I like Hulu, but I do not believe they operate under some "do our work for the benefit of the users" mantra. At some point they will do the analysis on ads vs. user dissatisfaction and will settle at a balance point.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
Simple reason: I can't use it, [(World Population)-(US population)] people can't either.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Hulu is starting to get a pretty good mass now. Hulu is my preferred player (ease of use, intrusiveness of ads, etc.). NBCs is better in some ways (higher resolution) but worse in others (less able to handle connection bumps). CBS' player is decent, and ABC's player is probably the least user friendly of the bunch.
Hulu is the future; content providers who don't offer online streaming will be left behind. It's really a win-win. Consumers get an easy and free option to catch up with their shows if they miss them. The content provider gets to manage the time it's up and gets ad revenue, and likely can use web metrics software to get a better idea of viewership/demographics (NetRatings, Quantcast, Google Analytics, etc.) since very few households influence the Nielsen Ratings.
They start making things available outside of the US. Until then, I'll find other means...
Who is John Galt?
the real question to me is what the heck has happened to Hulu's service for the last month? i used to have great playback even on my Celeron 800Mhz Tablet, but now all i get is dropped frames -- even on my Athlon XP 3000+!
last year i watched all the episodes of "Arrested Development" and was surprised by both the quality of the series (it was new to me) and the quality of the streaming. it only took me the first 60sec of AD's episode 1 to turn me into a big Hulu fan! i even got into the habit of watching movies there afterwards.
the chopped playback doesnt seem to be a bandwidth issue because the audio and video never stop and they dont get out of synch either. when you think Flash playback cant become any heavier, Adobe and Hulu show you otherwise. it makes me wonder if the use of Silverlight could make this less worse?
Can see anything in Hulu because I am blocked by the site since I am not in the US.
I have a virtual server located in the UD, may I use that slice to see Hulu? Not using VNC or remote visualization, but using it as a proxy. Any tip on how to do it?
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
i wish TBS and TNT made their streaming service less bureaucratic. last time i checked they required the installation of a Windows Media Player plugin that worked less than perfect on Firefox.
When I was a kid, I remember the first commercial break that contained 2 30-second commercials back-to-back instead of the normal 1 30-second commercial. People were outraged. How could they do it? Why were they trying to make us stop watching?
But I'm sure you would have told me "Don't worry, 2 commercials isn't that much." Fast forward a few decades and you now can't find the show for the advertising.
I wonder if ABC/Disney would be considering Hulu if they knew it means "body hair" in Hawaiian?
of "When will they stop screwing Canada."
As has been pointed out by dozens of people above.
I wouldn't download shows if I could watch them on Hulu...absent an alternative....what's my alternative?
Plus Hulu has every episode of Alf
http://www.hulu.com/alf
I suspect the real issue has little to do with Hulu and has more to do with a new non-cable provider. I'd hope that the cable companies had some "non-compete" language in their contract with content providers.
Hulu is slightly more convenient than missing a show on my TiVo. Sadly, Torrents via RSS feed are still much more convenient and remove the commercials and the show is 720p resolution. Add that I can keep the content locally, display it on almost any media player that supports xvid and I'm sold with RSS instead of any web site.
For that content that is only available via Hulu, like old TV shows, when they broke hulu_download, I stopped bothering with that site.
Someone said something about Firefox plugin AdBlock - from what I can see, that doesn't matter for blocking in-show ads. You just have to find the correct stream and grab it. Seems that some settings in Squid should be able to cache the streams.
FLV sucks.
I used to watch a lot of TV via the network web sites. It was great: didn't have to remember to set a recorder, didn't have to remember to go to the TV at a particular time, got shows that aren't available in my area without cable or a rooftop antenna (refuse to pay for one, landlord doesn't provide the other). Plus ABC shows were in a fancy widescreen mode that I can't get on my klunky old analog TV.
Then all the networks started switching to an evil software stack from Move Networks. Don't know the motivation (DRM? Outsourcing streaming infrastructure?) but it effectively cut me off from the sites that use it. The Move player requires more CPU bandwidth than my wimpy little tablet can handle. (So no more watching "Lost" in bed.) And even if I switch to my more powerful desktop machine, I get endless network. These might go away if I upgraded my DSL, but that's just not worth it.
Fortunately, a lot of the shows that I watch are also available on Hulu. And they still use a simple flash-based player. The rest I watch the old-fashioned way or do without.
Gotta wonder how much business Hulu has picked up this way.
>The real question to me is when will they stop screwing around with Boxee users?
Till Boxee and any other device or software works with out them intentionally breaking it, I am boycotting hulu and will continue to do so till they get their heads out of the posteriors.
1311393600 - Back to Black
I've got a little box where I once put in a list of shows I want to watch. As soon those as shows get posted to Usenet, it leeches them, and whenever I switch it on I can see if something new is on there.
I get all the latest shows in HD where available, practically as soon as they've aired, been encoded and posted. Oh, and I live in the Netherlands, so even if I *wanted* to watch Hulu, I can't.
I tried watching Lost on ABC's site and the experience was pretty bad. They had an annoying animated background with lightning going off while I was trying to watch the show. Even more annoying was the commercials they chose to air. I was watching season 2 and they showed commercials for the new season. I don't want too see ads for the new season which may contain spoilers for the season I'm currently watching!
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Why should a third party (boxee) be able to hijack Hulu's content for free? Boxee is a late-comer to an already crowded service niche. I love Boxee, but unless they are paying for online content, they have no rights to it. Content on one's hard disk is presumed to be already with in the user's rights to use.
Why is flash such a suckwhore on a mac G4? Watching flash video is painful.
It's the 21st century version of fiddling with the rabbit ears, adjusting the fine-tuning knob and pounding on the TV set.
Well, what do you expect? You're not using these systems in the way they were designed to be used, and so they're a huge pain in the ass. If you're ABC, this is a feature, not a bug.
(Presumably you should be using IE. Or just watching it over the air, with commercials, like ABC would prefer that you do.)
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
umm, boxee just loads hulu's flash applet, and zooms it to be full screen. the ads are still there.