Hulu's Hollywood overlords force Boxee block Hulu's Hollywood overlords have forced the popular American web TV portal to block fans from watching streaming shows on television sets with Boxee. Citing pressure from content providers, Hulu said the site's streaming shows will no longer be available through the free and open source media center platform. A joint ventures …
For the life of me, I can't understand why these morons fail to see what is coming.... and act *proactively*. They can choose their destiny or have it chosen for them.
This is a fantastic opportunity for the networks and content creators to separate themselves from the cable/satellite providers and come up with a reasonable model that is beneficial to both consumers and content providers.
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/MythStreams
RIAA, MPAA and all the other 4 letter curse words can eat it!
I don't mind seeing a few commercials (as one per break) but 3, 4, 5 or 6!!! per commercial break is lunacy.. The advertards need to get a grip or freetards will run them out of business.
Even though using Hulu is free, and the annoying trackers can be blocked while still watching the shows (with Firefox and add-ons), the fact it is only available in the US is kind of... stupid. The only justification for it is that ALL of the advertising are US centric, which is extremely easy to work around as most internet sites do a fine job of telling me who's single in my area with ease. Plus at least half of the adverts I see could easily be applicable to other English speaking markets, as charities, I'm almost sure, don't care if the money is coming from the USA AND others.
Though this could just be the fact they don't have the server bandwidth, and willingness to upgrade their bandwidth (as so many companies don't reinvest in infrastructure, leading to recessions, but that's a little off topic).
The potential good news of this is that it is possible, with the popularity of Hulu, now that so many are trading in their TV sets for streaming TV now that everyone here has(n't) gone digital, they may be getting ready to set up international Hulu sites, so that it all doesn't have to stream from the same servers.
Considering the complete lack of awareness within the US, up until recently, of the existence of Hulu, I doubt they will be any more informative of their creation of an EU, African, or Asian equivalent unless all of their TVs become obsolete too. Mine is now just my DVD/VHS/PS2 display system.
$50 for the digital box, plus another $50 for the antenna they were going to try to sneak on us after we all bought the box (HARR-HARR!), now all rotting on the distro's shelves.
SO chin up, and just wait a month or two for the UK/Euro Hulu to go online, then it won't matter.
I'm just waiting for you guys in the UK to let us here in the USA to pay for the Beeb player, IT Crowd season 3 please, PLEASE!
Mine's the one with the "WTF is going on anyway??" on it
But the embedded adverts are a pain in the arse. Double-bad is ABC's catchup service which has advertising you have to click on to continue your program.
For all their faults, Auntie's nailed it first time with iPlayer. The only bugger being you can't use iPlayer in the US and Hulu doesn't work in the UK.
Arsebiscuits.
who about rolling out to Canada even
Rights holders have to start waking up to realise the old geographic boundaries don't count in the same way they used to.
As other comments have said pirate bay and the like are so common now something has to be done to stop people using them not encouraging them to.
I missed recording a show the other day (only recently moving from the UK the TV schedules here are crazy, stuff changes days, times, disappears for a couple of weeks etc.) so I just found it online instead. An archos 605 with wi-fi and a docking station streams nicely from a network drive, it's no more difficult than using a PVR.
It's also handy when you see a trailer for a show that looks interesting and haven't seen series 1 to just grab it online to get up to date, I can think of at least 3 series that I watch now only for that reason.
The "content providers" simply fail to understand. Maybe some viewers too, but I think it's mostly the "content providers" (what a crap term) who don't get it.
The world has changed. I for one almost never watch broadcast telly (news excepted). The airwaves are just another content stream. The PC "downloads" and stores what i want, I then watch it at my leisure. I still see some adds, but the skip feature does away with them.
I agree with other in that this move will just compel more people to use illegal download.
The "content providers" are idiots.
Somehow one wonders whether HULU is supposed to deliver content to ANYONE, actually. First it's US-only, offending webfolks all over the globe, now that BOX thingy... I mean, if they want HULU to be an exclusive channel to pipe movies out to the jury members of the academy, so be it, but then they should make that clear at some point.
See here: http://linuxcentre.net/hulu-possibly-accessible-again-soon/ for the method required to get around the 'block'... The correct PID is generated by using some keys (in a var called ‘copyrighted_strings’) and AES crypto functions from this flash file: http://www.hulu.com/sec.swf (specifically function ‘dec’).
Seems like some pathetic effort to copyright a few random numbers so that boxee (et al) will be scared off from distrubuting it! I'll get my coat before they come after me...
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