News Hulu brings free NBC and Fox shows

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/10/31/hulu_brings_free_nbc_and_fox_shows/1

NBC has teamed up with Fox to bring you Hulu - an ad supported way of watching some of your favourite tv shows and movies for free.

 

Yeah... and when i want to watch it will probably say: "not supported in your region" just like some scifi.com episodes i tried to watch online. Its ridiculous really.

 

I've gotten that used to not having adverts in my life I doubt I could go back. Think I'll stick to the torrents and buying the DVD's.

 

I hate it when they do foolish things like region-locking (not that it's not trivially easy to get around with IP spoofing and such), and then go complain that people are pirating their content. Well no s***, Sherlock - if you won't let people use your website to get the content you put there, they're going to find another way to get it.

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.

 

NBC should just jump onboard Joost, like CBS did with CSI

 

If I can get free Local HDTV with a $15 antenna, I should be able to watch anything I want on the net for free... hell, I'm paying $50/month just for the net connection!

 

Let me guess: 320x240 resolution.

 

Probably not, but I'm optimistic.

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.

 

it has region locking? low resolution? obtrusive ads? then i want them to shove this initiative into their corporate ass while watching elephant/dugong porn.

people can say that : "at least that is a start".... well it is a start back in the stone age....

 

I can only imagine the adverts will be the same as we already get on the television, every 15 mins or so the show will take an "ad-break" where by it runs a series of ads then resumes which ever show it was you were watching.

 

Wow. Has anybody actually tried it yet, or are we all just bashing it for no apparent reason? It seems to me like there are a lot of negative assumptions being made here.

Edit:

I just went to the site and clicked on the "About Us" link. Straight from the webpage, and took all of 2 minutes to find:

-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.

 

YAY! I can watch house again! This time its legal and full of ads but meh! Woot for hulu!

 

Tried to sign up for Hulu but no luck yet. I think Joost will win the battle of the IPTV powerhouses, but then I would seen as though I am making a program going out on that network!

 

Hulu... what a name.

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.