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Hulu brings free NBC and Fox shows
Author: Phil CogarPublished: 31st October 2007
Shows such as House will be free! No torrent client is needed.
Hulu will also support embedding, which coincides with the growing social networking trend of linking favorite videos on user profiles and more. Users will also be able to select specific clips and email them to friends, allowing them to share specific moments from their favorite shows and movies.
This news comes shortly after NBC have announced that it is pulling all of its content from the iTunes store.
NBC CEO Jeff Zucker claims that Apple has “destroyed the music business” with its music store, and refuses to allow it to do the same with video. Of course this comes after Steve Jobs, who has been known to regularly defend lower-priced media and support DRM-free products in order to offer fair products to customers, has refused to comply with Zucker’s demands. One of these demands was a share of iPod sales, claiming "Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content, and made a lot of money,” which obviously must have saved the dying iPod brand…oh wait.
Another one of Zucker’s perfectly reasonable requests was that Apple break the otherwise uniform pricing of $1.99 per episode across its iTunes store and price one NBC show at $2.99. This of course comes not too long after NBC credited Apple with saving The Office, which has become a hit show since.
However the dust settles, though, the consumer wins; free shows and movies on Hulu, free sharing of your own clips on YouTube, and music and non-NBC TV episodes still priced reasonably in the iTunes store.
Do you think that this is a win-win situation? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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Comments (15)
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I'll see on Monday what I think of this. But I'm guessing that it'll be crap, given the general attitude of the big studios. Sorry, but if I can't download it and put it on my portable, it's really not much good to me. While I can stream audio (at least podcast-quality) over EDGE if I've got good signal, that's not even close to the case with video.
Let me guess: 320x240 resolution. :'(
First, I'd have to see what this hulu is really like. Is resolution acceptable, about what I would get from "Over The Air" HD? Or even SD? If it's less than 600x400, then no thanks.
Secondly, are the ads non-obtrusive? I don't mind seeing ads in an iframe, but once the ads cover any of the so-called "content" like on several "media sites" (whether that would be text/icons embedded in the video, or little holographic people that float over an article, bantering to you till you can adblock it, etc) you can count me out.
Third: Will it be easy? If it is harder than firing up BitTorrent, you can count a LOT of people out. ;)
I doubt they'd let video of that quality into the wild, it's probably 160*120.
people can say that : "at least that is a start".... well it is a start back in the stone age....
Edit:
-monkey
I think he means the native resolution of the video
you can watch 160 * 120 in fullscreen, but like youtube, only if you like pixellation.
Theyfeel iTunes destroyed the musicbusiness because it sold millions of iPods over the back of the contentdeliverers? Uhm, I tihnk you're totally wrong there... instead of downloading it illegally, people slowly started to actually buy your content on sites/programs like iTunes! So instead of making a bigger loss, you actually made some money with digital content.
Besides that, Hulu might have a nice quality, but you can't watch it on a train or plane if you travel a lot, you get free DRM which people have been trying to get away from, you get annoying adds where people have not missed one bit, ánd you do something as silly as region-blocking (it's understandable, but do it in a less obtrusive way).
All in all; I personally don't think Hulu will live that long. It gives me a Napster live-die-live-die-live-die-live again kinda feeling.