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Hulu May Begin Charging For Video Content
An anonymous reader writes "According to Jonathan Miller, News Corp's CDO, Hulu may soon begin charging subscription fees for some of their online content. News Corp is the parent company of Fox, which owns a huge portion of Hulu. When Miller of Newscorp was asked if Hulu would begin charging for online content during an Interview with Daily Finance, he said that 'the answer could be yes.' He went on to say that he doesn't 'see why over time that shouldn't happen.'"
Since we still can't watch Hulu in Canada, I won't be paying anything. It's probably cheaper than cable anyways.
Jeruvy
I think what works for consumers most likely -- and this has to be tested, frankly -- is bundles. I think you have to figure out what are the right bundles that people buy and what's contained in that bundle. For example, you could have -- and I'm making this up entirely -- you could have a New York bundle, and that could consist of various papers or publications that are relevant to the audience in New York, and you could make that all, potentially, a bundle to a consumer at one price.
For what it's worth, he also made this statement:
I went from paying $14 to The Wall Street Journal to paying $10 to Amazon. Now the splits there, and I think this is relatively well known, are very, very much in favor of Amazon. So I became very much less valuable to The Wall Street Journal. That's part one. Part two is they don't know I exist. I went from being someone who's their subscriber to being someone who is an Amazon subscriber, which The Wall Street Journal has no visibility back to and cannot manage that customer relationship. . . . So they've lost both the customer management and, trust me, the lion's share of the economics.
You know I hate to be voice of calm reason, folks but this is all the original source reported:
Asked specifically about the future of online video joint venture Hulu, which is currently advertising-supported, he said it "is an environment for premium content." Pointing to the popularity of iPhone applications, he added: "We're seeing the beginning of a very strong app economy."
From there, you can trace a very hilarious wave of the telephone game from blog to blog of people slowly blowing it out of proportion as it's put together that this guy is talking about paid subscriptions and he's in charge of Hulu therefore Hulu must be becoming a paid subscription service.
My work here is dung.
...You didn't see this coming?
"Our goal each year should be to increase the number of goals we set for ourselves!"
Is anyone seriously surprised? Did anyone really think they were going to give away their content for free forever? Of course they were giving it away free initially to generate interest and then later going to tack on a price tag...
Do they feel the need to add a subscription fee when they already show commercials....? Isn't that what drives dissatisfaction with cable?
I was wondering when it was going to happen. The commercials were not terribly long, and many of them were simply blank.
The whole thing did not seem like a viable business venture, except in the very rare case where you wanted to buy a DVD
of a show. I don't know about you, but why would I want to do that ?
real headline should be "Hulu expects viewership to drop off significantly."
If they charge for on demand content, then people will just go back to downloading it for free.
I came here for a good argument
Get them hooked with freebies - then hit them in the wallet.
Another company who isn't satisfied with the revenue stream from ads now wants to charge for content. Sorry. Not interested. I can watch my cable TV that I already pay for and if I want get a DVR and record my shows and watch them when I want!!! WOW what an idea!!! No I don't work for the cable company or a satellite TV company. I haven't been to their site but my kids have. Not worth the subscription unless it was like 2 or 3 bucks a year. 10 bucks a month can be spent more wisely in other areas.
Fine, but it's either subscription or ads. You don't get to do both.
They own pretty much everything, don't they?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
And this will move people to other services like Fancast.com which also does commercials but less often and on my system at least without the insane jump in volume.
"Everybody funny. Now you funny too"
Many of us outside the US can't use Hulu anyway; so it doesn't matter ;-)
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
The day they start charging for content is the day they start down the path of constantly losing visitors until they become another clueless Web 2.0 failure.
When it comes to media on the internet, customers always have the option of getting a particular show, movie, song, etc. for free. When a site charges for content, the customer then sees himself as having two options: pay for an item or go somewhere else to get the same item for free. Pretty obvious choice, isn't it? I don't know why it's so hard for some content providers to grasp.
Slashdot has paid subscription and I don't see people throwing hiss fits here. I'd see nothing wrong with a pay-to-remove-the-ads service (assuming they don't double up on the ads just to annoy people into paying.) What if they charge so you can stream movies still at the theatre? There are a lot of reasons pay content might not be a bad thing. It all depends on how they go about doing it.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
I sense a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly driven back to piracy.
Charming man. I wish I had a daughter so I could forbid her to marry one. -Arthur Dent
Back to TPB
He went on to say that he doesn't 'see why over time that shouldn't happen.'
To keep their users? *shrug*
Sometimes I think the ad model works better here. There are so many other free sources for video these days, especially online-based. :-p
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
... what it was always designed to do, though admittedly at a higher, more general level than originally envisioned: It will route around the blockage.
-k
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
I can't say I didn't expect this because I did. NewsCorp pretty much monopolized the cable television network market. Hulu better come up for a new advertising pitch however since their main draw on all of those commercials was the whole it's free thing.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
Also if the subscription meant the option to watch a full series without commercial interruption that would be great too.
I have to admit the only reason I downloaded a few Stargate episodes was because I didn't have a TV set I could watch it on. If instead I had the option to pay a minimal monthly fee and pick and choose the shows I wanted to watch with the plus of seeing the show the day it aired, I would have had zero desire to download anything. As it was, a few times I downloaded something, there were no sound or special effects added in, and many times I opted to just buy the video off iTunes, due to the quality of the content. A subscription fee on the range of $10-$15 month would be nice. Anything more, good luck with that Hulu, I'd rather just buy DVDs and episodes of iTunes.
.... ... }
int main (void) {
Probably a link between News Corp and Rupert Murdoch's well-known Republican affiliation.
Hulu, nice knowin' ya...
Lurking in the desert
The whole reason I even watch Hulu is because I don't want to deal with getting the digital converter box when the change happens, and it's cool being able to watch things when you want to. Having to pay for Hulu just ruins the entire great idea of it being like DTV with the normal free channels. Hell, I'd even be cool with more commercials in their shows to keep it free for me. Plus I can watch all the Firefly episodes on there. That's just awesome .
People watched you because you were free. You were a simple way to watch a show someone had missed that maybe the Tivo didn't record due to electrical storm. Once you start charging, you lose your viewership. No viewership? No ad revenue. No viewership? No subscription revenue. And no, you're not Too Big To Fail (TM), so no bailout revenue either.
Too bad. You spent all that money on TV and movie ads about evil alien plots to get eyes on your site, just to screw it all up.
I haven't really used Hulu much, but from what I saw, it's not really worth paying for.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
fans of hulu will migrate to a competing web video service, if they are forced to pay.
Then I see myself watching Hulu less and less
Really? If having paying customers allows them to post a better range of content, I'm all for it, especially if there is little to no advertising in the paid content.
My biggest frustration with Hulu today is that they don't have the full archive of shows that I'd like to watch. Since I don't want to start a new show in the middle, I have to find the earlier episodes elsewhere or wait for the DVD. I'd gladly pay, say, $15/month if it meant access to the whole archive of every show they have.
The long-term future of TV includes on demand access to whatever the consumer wants. Making content is expensive and risky and therefore must be compensated. Providing on demand access cuts into other revenue sources, like DVD sales, and therefore must be compensated.
/...
I admit that when I heard about Hulu, I was skeptical. Very skeptical. I also thought it was a bad idea, I thought it would never fly. I was wrong. I watched my first episodes of Firefly on Hulu. My wife and I use Hulu daily for our television. We don't own a television that we use and we don't particularly care. We liked Hulu... when we're watching actual television we're appalled at the number of ads we have to sit through. Anyway, I see this (surprise) as a bad move for Hulu. They've got a good gig going. My suspicion (with evidence to back me up) is that Hulu was doing fine the way it was going, that it was not taking away viewers from television, and that it was overall a productive means of legally watching content online. Hulu will curl up and die if people have to shell out for it. Might as well start buying the shows you care about on Amazon or iTunes.
My biggest frustration with Hulu today is their use of horrendously inefficient and technically inferior player implementations.
Adobe Flash Player is a resource hog - I've had issues with 720p video playing smoothly even on a Core 2 Quad with a GeForce 9800GT under Linux.
The same video plays smoothly on my old Athlon XP 2800+ with a GeForce 7800GS if I use rtmpdump on a CBS high def stream and then play it back with mplayer. (Not an available option for Hulu.)
If they used a player that were:
1) As cross-platform as the existing solution (MacOS, Linux, Windows - this kills Silverlight for which Linux support typically lags at least one full version behind on)
2) Played back 720p video smoothly on my old Athlon XP 2800+ and 480p video smoothly on my Asus Eee 1000HE.
I would consider a subscription if reasonably priced and ads were removed. I would NOT consider pay-per-view.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Seriously I try to get this through people's heads all the time... for geeks we sure can be dumb. It is and has been free. If everyone ignores the service if/when it goes pay or even if only parts go pay only IGNORE them, also make it known you are NOT going to pay for the content... ads are enough to deal with for the content. Then Hulu (which is already successful) will find alternate avenues for revenue. If everyone just jumps in right off the bat you have instantly ensured all future video services like this will be pay-only. Wake up! Please.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
I have one of these already. It's called "cable." You pay a monthly fee and you get to watch a bunch of different channels with lots of different content. The only difference I can tell between a paid Hulu and cable is that Hulu is only "on demand," has less content, and wants to be PC-only. So, basically, Hulu will be the crappy version of cable.
Then I see myself watching Hulu less and less
Really? If having paying customers allows them to post a better range of content, I'm all for it, especially if there is little to no advertising in the paid content.
After all, cable, which only has paying customers, has been so good about having little to no advertising, even for the "premium" channels that cost even more to get.
I'll gladly pay for a service like Hulu if I can watch it from outside the US. No silly "this video isn't available in your region". Just show the damn thing and take my money. Preferably, there's a choice between a small fee per episode or a subcription model.
But I expect they won't do that. So in effect, they don't want my money, they like to trouble me online and would rather see me download tv series.
Well fuck them, then. I could just download the shows off BitTorrent and get higher quality, and less ads, all for the whopping price of $0.
For a download based service, sure, I can see that. But streaming sucks, more so on video. Unless connections get a whole lot better, I'm not the least bit interested in streaming. With downloads, I can do HD, no problems. About 1GB per hour at the standard illegal sources last time I checked. It doesn't take a whole lot to screw up a stream with those sorts of bandwith requirements. Downloads just go a little slower for a bit. Unencrypted, 720p or 1080p, h264 video (3Mbit/sec minimum, probably about 6Mbit/sec for 1080p), AC3 audio, MKV container preferred.
Sell me that, with a fast server to download from and an RSS feed I can automate the process from, for a reasonable price, and I *WILL* buy. Reasonable price would be about half what the season goes for on Blu-Ray. I'm not getting media, packaging, shipping, etc., so I won't pay for it either. And if I'm paying, it must be ad-free. If I'm not paying, or getting a significant discount, ads would be acceptable. I personally wouldn't take any more than about 5min/hour of ads though. If I'm paying, it must also include re-download rights. Perhaps restricted to off-peak, or with a small fee for using up said capacity, but a very small fraction of the original purchase price. I would also require that the episodes be made available by midnight of the original air date. If they want to compete with PirateBay and friends, they have to provide all of the above. People will pay for the convenience, quality, and knowing they are legal. Cause paying customers issues, and they will go elsewhere, or just not bother. The studios have the ability to take the online market by storm and keep it. They just have to step up. Not that they will.
Streaming crap quality with encryption... Not interested.
As a reader of a newspaper, his "customer relationship" is Not My Problem. I do not choose to be the target of marketers' "customer management" fantasies.
TV networks generally have 15 minutes of commercials for every 45 minutes of programming and as loathsome as having that many commercials may be, I'd, personally, rather have that than have to pay $20.00 / month or whatever. And I don't see pirating as a viable alternative, either - however unjustified the penalties for copyright violation may be, the fact remains that if you get caught, you're liable to be fined several thousand dollars.
especially if there is little to no advertising in the paid content
That seems quite unlikely...
See subject.
Moderators: Before moderating a comment Insightful/Informative, check to see if a child post has already refuted it.
I guess they're not getting enough resale value from those brains they're slurping.
I've already stopped watching them and have stopped using them as demos in my shop. No more recommendations.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
which has the same shows. Why would I pay for this too? I use hulu every now and then. Usually when comcrap's service (which I'm paying for) craps out (the SA HD DVR is a piece of flaming shit). It's nice for when on the road too. But, really, I'm already paying for that content, so why would I pay for it again? I'm sure the cable companies don't want to pay for this... but aren't they already, and that's why they charge us?
Never!
Here are the conditions under which I will agree to pay my money for Hulu:
1. No ads in the paid content. AT ALL. Not now, not ever.
2. Cheap, a-la carte subscriptions for individual shows. If I only need a few shows from Discovery, Nickelodeon and Food Network, I should be able to sign-up for only those shows.
3. Compatibility with an inexpensive hardware device of some sort (Apple TV, Xbox or PS3 will do).
4. Content is served in _at least_ 720p with high encoding quality.
These conditions are not negotiable. If all four are fulfilled, I, for one, will welcome our money charging overlords.
To bad this story is bogus. I was really looking forward to paying money to Hulu AND being forced to watch commercials.
I would pay for Hulu if they let me download ad-free shows to watch later on.
Honestly, why doesn't Hulu develop a P2P service with a business model similar to Napster?
Imagine if Hulu would let you stream online for free with ads, or pay 7$-10$ a month to download the shows through a custom p2p application? I'd gladly pay to be able to take the shows with me on the road. Along with that, they could offset they're costs by using p2p.
This is how I see the future of television. A better version of netflix basically.
It'll change when somebody offers something better. Fiber service is helping in some areas... competition is a wonderful thing. If only people didn't use their video content provider as their ISP, I think competition would be even better. Nothing like the cable cos (and the telcos who offer fiber) limiting internet volume to keep people from downloading their video content.
There are a lot of IFs, such as:
...IF regulatory hurdles to video content delivery are manageable
...IF distribution is separated from content production (this, IMO, is the biggest hurdle -- the networks are canceling shows that they don't produce, in favor of less-popular but self-produced shows that are more profitable).
...IF a retailer of video programming is able to negotiate deals with enough of the content producers to have a decent selection.
I see video content as being where music was 10 years ago, except that more of the producers have limited online official distribution.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I sense a conspiracy.
I've been fond of Hulu since Day One. There's stuff there I like, I send it to my 32 inch Sony HDTV in the living room via a 25' VGA cable to the RGB port. It's pretty good quality (at 480p), which the Sony upconverts to 1080p. I do get smearing from time to time, but it's infrequent enough not to bother me too much.
If Hulu wants my money, however, I'm done. They have advertising....they don't need subscription revenue. Of course, they may WANT more $$$, but I don't feel there's a compelling need to charge for watching old Speed Racer cartoons!
I'll see what they come up with, but right now, it's a non-starter for me.
I am my own gestalt.
...should be ct.hulu.com
ct = content toll.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Assuming ISP's start have usage caps, who is going to seriously double pay for Internet content?
the whole point of having advertising is to not charge for content.
the whole point of charging for content is not having advertising.
having both is the epic fail.
they're going to find out just how fast the consumer rules the Internet.
They're using their grammar skills there.
give me an easy way to get it on my HD tv without jumping through hoops and I might pay for some stuff but not for what they offer now.
I dumped cable and live a-la-web tv. I pay for Netflix streaming and find it is worth it.
If Hulu got rid of the stupid 5 trailing episodes thing and had full catalogs of the shows, got some decent movies, and got rid of the commercials I would pay. I *will not* pay for a special section that gets a few bones thrown in every month or if I have to put up with their 8 commercials over and over and over..holy crap water torture over and over.
Go big, do it right, and I would pay.
When cable first came out and they wanted you to subscribe there was a lot of content with limited interuption. Now there is no difference between cable and free TV except you can pay extra for not being interupted at all (HBO etc). The media companies have not come to terms with the fact that their properties are not as valuable as they use to be. There are other entertainment options like gaming that are attracting peoples attention. It is not that money is not being spent, it is being spent on more and various other things that people find entertaining. The larger companies are finding it hard to adopt hence Sony's call for internet guard rails. Their business models are kaput and they are to big to fail I mean change:0 All I can say is good luck with that. I think we are looking at the next GMs.
The only thing of real value is convenience. But convenienceneeds to have enough value to pay for. You need to make money from the ancillary items. Ads, Disks, shirts, etc . . .
".' He went on to say that he doesn't 'see why over time that shouldn't happen.'"
Becasue people will go to other sources?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm not going to pay $60 a month for the access to the internet and then more money on top of that for content.
$60 a month is about all I'm willing to pay for the whole shebang.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
???
While I can understand your argument in principle, I think you are overvaluing the royalties paid by the cable company to content providers as a portion of the cost to bring that content to you. For the most part the only cost to the cable company is channel integration. I would bet that maintenance of that database is nominal. Content providers make their money off of commercials, but after that, cable companies are pirates of that content. If I remember correctly, the settlement that came from those cases was that cable companies would be required to provide some number of public broadcasting channels for some number of stations they pirate. So after they have built this giant content pipe, they regulate who does and does not connect to their giant data stream in a very simple way, on or off, with very little exception. The exceptions are 1) content where per channel royalties exist (HBO, Cinemax, Encore, whatever), and 2) per program royalties channels(pay-per-view). I would expect that there is some speculation going on and the cable companies pay bulk block rates, bringing the channels cheaper to you (assuming you could even get them some other way) and likely making decent money on the side. BUT, the real business of the cable company is not the content, but the pipe. So cable companies pay for almost nothing but the initial infrastructure cost (plus the bureaucracy involved in that), then customer service, billing, and technicians and the such. One product and one price means low overhead and extremely competitive. One the cost of the infrastructure is paid off, then the money is REALLY good.
So what you pay now is a per month connection fee that for the most part is a portion of the cost to build the system that brings the content to you. Now al a carte is a request to take a very simple system and make it relatively very complicated. More equipment to control and regulate what each customer gets, these systems would of course be much more software based compared to the very dumb light switch service=on/off situation right now. The number of switches now is one per customer, based on did they pay the bill. You are proposing changing that to a number of switches equal to the number of possible customers multiplied by the number of possible channels they ever hope for the system to support (needs to be scalable). The handling of the switches would need to be related an exponentially more complicated billing system very likely bringing in security issues. Think Sigma6, in general, more things involved is always more thing to go wrong. No offense to anyone who works as a technician for a cable company, but at present it really doesn't take much of a rocket scientist to operate these networks, and even if you would disagree, you are talking about increasing the level of technical knowledge by a maintenance exponentially, meaning significantly more training, and significantly higher salaries.
So an exponentially more complicated system that personally I can only imagine would be exponentially more expensive to operate so they can more carefully micromanage their billing scheme based on something that doesn't even impact them. The only cost thing they really pay for and bill you for is infrastructure and maintenance! Why should they care at all which channels you watch? If anything, just for the sake of simplicity alone, they should just meter the time you spend watching tv per television. I think that would correlate much better than which stations you watch with regard to what costs are actually incurred by the cable company, and just embed that into the cost of the installation and you end of with a system that isn't any more expensive on the whole across the entire customer base.
Is $30 really so much? You think it would even be possible to design and implement a system where it would even be reasonable to bring you one channel for < $30/month? I would bet that an al a carte system would have a surcharge of at least $30/month before you even get any channels. The reality is tha
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
IIRC, Flash for Linux doesn't use any hardware acceleration for X. I believe they just use the X11 shared memory output, which will bring all but the fastest processors to their knees.
To test (since I could be wrong), get a 720p test video and run it in like this in a terminal:
mplayer file -vo x11
See if it still chokes. If so, there's your problem.
Sure, but they'll pull a Steam.
$1 = E1.
Can't be arsed to figure out the euro symbol on slashdot.
€ didn't do shit.
It's only going to work when all I have to do is plug in the TV that I've just bought and it'll immediately hook up to Digital TV (Freeview in the UK), then I plug in my network connection and it immediately connects to Hulu, YouTube and others and offers them as channels. Until then, how the hell are the majority of people in the next 20 years (40+ years old) supposed to do it?
--- Band: Joey Ultra
What makes this "Insightful?"
Broadcast television is almost entirely supported by advertising. The evangelical religious broadcaster has his own product to sell.
Your PBS station subsists on a lighter diet of adds, foundation grants, government funding and nickel and dime contributions from viewers.
Broadcast is inherently mass media.
Multicast digital might give you sixteen broadcast choices where there were only four before. But that is about the limit.
You have to deliver big numbers or advertisers drift away. When too many advertisers drift away, the screen goes dark.
Competition from cable, satellite, home video, the video game and the Internet makes it very hard to get what you need.
Games and reality shows are cheap to produce. But even WalMart knows that there is only so much room at the bottom.
Historically, the big spenders in television were the automakers, tobacco companies, and brewers.
It's still startling to see Fred Flintstone light it up for Winston. Flintstones Cigarette Commercial
Take major league sports out of the picture, and these props have been mostly kicked away.
Hey News Corp, wake yup! You successfully drew people away from bittorrent and earn revenue through ads. Don't fuck it up now by encouraging everyone to go back to bittorrents, where you receive ZERO revenue!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I want you off the fucking comments, you prick. Don't just be sorry, think for one fucking second. What the FUCK are you DOING? Are you professional or not?
Am I going to walk around and make off-topic shit comments, in the middle of your Canadian threads? Then why the fuck are you posting your shit here? Ah da da dah, no Hulu in Canada, like this in the background. What the fuck is it with you? What don't you fucking understand?
You got any fucking idea about, hey, it's fucking distracting having somebody modding up clutter at the beginning of the fucking comments? Give me a fucking answer! What don't you get about it?
How was it? I hope it was fucking good, because it's useless now, isn't it? Fuck-sake man, you're amateur. CmdrTaco, you got fucking something to say to this prick?
So, your issue is that their player doesn't do 720p content smoothly on your setup? What I want to know is where is this 720p content on Hulu? The best I can find is 480p and it works just fine for me.
This sounds pretty good, pretty smart. So long as there are no commercials on the site or in the videos, I would gladly pay a fair amount for a TV show. Say, maybe ten cents per episode, or a dollar for a whole season.
Ignoring the fact that this "news" is just blog-generated rubbish, personally I'd be quite happy to pay for a streaming service, under the assumption that we had the connection speeds to give suitable content. 720p h264 at 6Mbit (maybe 5Mbit if they really have to stretch it) with AC3 sound, and an open protocol, and that'll be just fine. You need a pretty damn good connection to ensure you get it without problems. The current stuff they have is ridiculously rubbish quality in comparison. Given that the net connections aren't at that level yet, and likely won't be for a while, I'd also be quite happy with downloads - 6Mbit for 720p or 12Mbit for 1080p. Allow me to download in an open container (mkv is fine) and I'll be quite happy to pay the current going rate for Bluray pricing per season (even without all the extras), for the convenience of not having to rip it myself.
If so, sign me up! But if they are looking to have their cake and eat it too by running commercials to paying customers I would not even think about it.
I for one welcome our tentacled video-induced braingoo slurping overlords...
I'm sorry, this reply is not available in your region.
(summary: fuck Hulu anyhow.)
This would be the largest set back to a fully on-line a-la-carte system that we all dream of. Our providers, unless they offer a-la-carte and FREE(with monthly cable bill) On demand streaming video then it seems that the big cable companies will do whatever they can possible to circumvent this type of system from working.
CBS provides 720p but not Hulu, using the same technology (H.264 in an Adobe FLV container over RTMP).
It happens that CBS videos can also be ripped with rtmpdump, allowing performance of different players with the same video to be compared.
As a basis of comparison, the 720p CBS streams play smoothly on an Athlon XP 2800+ with mplayer, while 480p Hulu streams using the same codec and streaming format with Adobe's flash player do not.
Similarly, prior to Hulu making rtmpdump impossible to use by moving to RTMPE, Hulu video played fine with plenty of CPU margin if mplayer were used on the same machine.
So my issue is that a setup capable of 720p using the same codec and a decent player can't even do 480p with theirs. Hell, even their "low res" 360p video rarely plays smoothly.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
"which owns a huge portion of Hulu"
huge = 27%
--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulu
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
make it compatible on platforms other than a pc (mobile browsers, ps3, psp, wii, etc) and it might be worth it- it isn't worth it if I have to be tethered to the pc-