Hulu has started offering the above box to international users visiting the site from outside of the United States, the first sign that the service may soon be available in more countries than one.
First spotted by Watch TV Online, the region drop down box preferences Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia above all other countries, suggesting that they might be the first outside of the United States with Hulu access.
I spoke with Eric Feng, the CTO of Hulu briefly when Mark interviewed him back in January and I asked him about international distribution then. Mark wrote the response up as:
Hulu is working on providing its videos internationally but content rights issues will take time to work through. Eric couldn’t provide any time table for when we might see Hulu available internationally
I do recall Eric saying that Hulu was keen on rolling out international access, and the only thing holding them back was the rights holders, but given a chance they’d press the button tomorrow.
In the mean time, read this post on how to access Hulu now from outside of the United States.
Watch TV Online is fastly
Hulu needs to extend their available programming, fast. Old movies and tv series will not carry the site far, even if intl viewers are able to access the site.
Hulu video from outside of the United States
I’m still waiting for them to start offering Hulu in Luxembourg…
I think Hulu could be a revolution once it will be able to stream around the world, and possible in several languages other than english (French, German, Italian, etc.)
I’m in UK (London) and I can still watch Hulu.
http://www.techsted.com
I’m in Brazil, I tested it but didn’t get that screen, just the good old black one (although it links to a FAQ answer that says the same thing, but doesn’t allow me to input my email).
Same problem than Caio, I live in France and don’t have this page.
Since TV and the Internet are one exaggeration, I guess the content rights issues will take longer time to make it available especially for Asian countries because TV is still dominant there.
It’s interesting since their main audience would probably be international viewers wishing to watch American shows. That being said, they’ll probably never get the rights to stream those shows outside the US.
Hulu needs to work on streaming to the US first. Back when it was private beta it was working great! Ever since they opened it up streaming likes to pause 3-4 times mid show.
Best,
Eric
It only makes sense. International growth in video is dwarfing the rate of growth here.
I think they just have to iron out how ads are distributed to individual venues.
Take your time…
Rest of Europe will just continue to use torrents tpo get the latest shows. Sad
mike,
Can we please put a limit on the Australia news. No one cares about Australia. Its a worthless continent.
I’m visiting Singapore right now and can’t view Hulu?
Screen shot from Singapore…
[img]http://www.s2ki.com/forums/index.php?act=module&module=gallery&cmd=viewimage&img=522509[/img]
At last, at last, we’re all longing waiting or it in europe !
Great work, if they can manage to do it within the year they’d have set up a huge landmark. I don’t think they’ll be able to do it though. Canada is a possibility, UK is trickier, Australia is near out of the question.
One thing’s for certain, they’ll most likely never get Asia included - for some reason most advertisers consider Asia to be lesser in quality. I’m not sure why, but they seem to generalize that visitors from Asia and to a lesser extent Africa as poor quality traffic and thereby not as important as North America and Europe, which is why such countries in these continents are likely to see Hulu content first.
I’d be very interested to see where that puts broadcasters in those territories who are purchasing online rights for their “Catch Up TV” type services.
Not to mention the enormous difficulty in synchronising with windows for Pay TV and Free to Air TV rights in multiple countires across a region.
In much of Asia, the big paytv channels pay handsomely for the right to be first to broadcast premiere series.
I really WANT to love hulu. Someday they will get their act together. The site is beautiful but their content is lacking. For example, right now I can get episodes 3 and 4 of season 4 of Battlestar Gallactica. WHERE ARE ep 1 and 2? The content skips those and offers me some from season 3. This isn’t right. I’ll watch the ads if they give me the content. Lame.