Update: Hulu videos are now on MSN, too.
If you are among the many who haven’t received an invitation to the recently launched private beta of Hulu.com - and probably won’t because users can’t send their friends invitations - you don’t have to keep waiting to get your Hulu fix. AOL has already posted 18 shows from Hulu including Heroes and The Office. Expect them to add even more content soon, as there are many more shows that will be distributed by Hulu to its partner sites.
The videos are displayed in AOL’s own player, which unfortunately lacks a few key features including full screen mode, embedding, and sharing (the player on Hulu.com, by contrast, has all of these features and more). You also cannot seek forward to any spot in a video. From what I’ve seen so far, the advertisements played within videos (pre-roll and mid-roll) are quite short and unobtrusive. The resolution is good but not great.
If you’re located outside of the US, you may actually need to wait after all. My colleague Duncan, who lives in Australia, sees this error message when he attempts to view a Hulu video on AOL, which suggests that Hulu is restricting distribution by geography. If you’re proxy server-savvy, you may be able to get around this. Please let us know in the comments if you do.
See our review of Hulu here.
Now, did they do this on purpose? Seems like they wouldn’t have…
Just watched a full episode of The Simpsons on AOL Video/Hulu. The quality is very good.
Great stuff, except they ban any IP outside of USA to view content. The good old Aussies cant view anything.
What a crock …….
PSS - Seems Proxy sites like http://www.3proxy.com are baned also. They might be using the Google Blacklist site for open proxy filtering.
Back to the old anonymizer then …….. http://www.anonymizer.com/
Too bad Heroes blows so bad now. Disagree? Watch the ‘Double-Dutch’ scene in episode 5 again, and if you survive, come back and explain how you can look at that kid’s crappy ’stache and just the general ridiculousness of that scene.
Eh, not being able to fast forward sucks. Cause they want you to watch the ads.
Are they downloadable in any formats? What resolution? Are they uploading past episodes so we don’t have to buy the DVD?
@6 –> why should we “grow up” ?
License the fking content so everyone can see it.
Why open a platform to compete with Youtube when its not even international –> youtube never had such restrictions.
So go blow yourself.
Like I wrote on your other post:
After checking with friends, it looks like its closed for Europe and the middle east as well as Australia. That really sucks.
“The requested video cannot be displayed in your region.”
So AOL still yet doesn’t get the idea of internet.
Time to get back to dowload the shows of interest from torrents.
The especially annoying usability feature is that the video is displayed in thumbnails list and even the video details page. So filter everything non-accessible out and don’t fool the would be users that one has sooo many conent to show.
A normal reaction of a normal user is to dump hulu and go to some of those tens or hundreds of other hosting sites.
As usual, their system filters access form Brazil. I can’t even try it.
*from
How long ’til a Facebook application?
Hopefully they’ll be some way for 3rd party to turn it into an FB app, because News Corp sure as hell isn’t going to want Hulu to exist inside of FB.
Then again, they’re syndicating content to MySpace, AOL, Yahoo, so why not reach into FB as well? At the end of the day, they still own the player and they still have the ability to sell ads inside of their shows, so why not?
Dan
http://www.ackermangreenberg.com
@10 Dont overestimate the use of those other download sites. Although I have no hard numbers, my gutfeeling would be that it’s maybe 10% of users that is both savvy enough and engaged enough to go through that trouble.
(Sure, that could mean a 100 million people worldwide using torrents, piratebay, russian music downloads and whatnot - but that also means 1 billion people not doing so….)
Sites like Hulu.com might be the breakthrough for the big audience. But it is remarkable how they dont seem to be able to break out of the general paradigm - content still being scheduled and geographically restricted. That’s sooo 20th century
The site uses http://releasegeo.hulu.com/geoCheck to check whether or not to display videos. The response is either ‘not-valid’ or ‘valid’.
Redirect this subdomain to your own server (which always returns ‘valid’) and the videos should work.
I tried that, but get a ‘The requested video is not available’ error?
…and there it comes: to every protection mechansim you have a remedy.
Would be interesting to see how Hulu develops over time…
Nice to see them going in the right direction. Sad I can’t see any of the videos in Estonia
Uuhhrrr… why can’t I find Heroes on that list? I don’t see any NBC episodes on the AOL Video website…
Heh, found it. Can’t view it on my region though.
I don’t get this. Why is Puerto Rico a part of the United States when you guys need help in your silly wars, when you come here with your “superior” Army and take lives from here and deposit them in your silly aquarium of lies…
… but we aren’t part of the United States for watching video? Contests?
I still don’t get this.
It all works perfectly for me. Looks great!!!! I still don’t think it should replace their presence in iTunes.
Doesn’t work in Europe either. For all their hype not much seem to have changed. Europeans are still left with Bittorrent or Usenet as the only viable alternative, when you want to watch movies at home without spending hours going to a shop and standing in line to rent DVDs.
Come on. How hard can it be? Amazon and Apple have both proven that people are willing to pay for movies and music.
So stop excluding the EU! Theres almost 350 mio. of us, and we got more money to spend, than the average american.
The music and movie industry must be the only industry in the world, whos against making money.
Looks like the videos are also up on MSN:
http://tv.msn.com/tv/full-episodes
WAY more than 18 shows too…
…though I still can’t access them from Canada.
Doesn’t work in Canada either.
Doesn’t work in Spain either.
No go in Taiwan either (why did I even try?)
被請求視頻無法顯示在你的地區
“The requested video cannot be displayed in your region”
No not in China either.
I watched AOL video before, which is the TVKOO, i think.
Work pretty good for in my areas.
AOL, Mediazone.com, NBC Sports are all using TVKOO, but i guess users like try more new things, that’s why AOL adds lulu.
“The requested video cannot be displayed in your region.” for Philippines as well.