Ok, I’ve been ridiculously hard on Hulu from the beginning. But that ends. Today.
Because Hulu is now streaming full episodes of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, from Comedy Central. No more Tivo. No more dealing with BitTorrent. I can just log in and watch the show in 480p, and that makes me very, very happy.
I will never again refer to Hulu as Clown Co. Or mention that Hulu means “cease & desist” in Swahili. And I will stop making fun of them for stealing Google’s mission statement and planning to sell panty hose.
Hell, I’ll even let the occasional puff piece in Fortune go by without comment.
Hulu is also adding a few shows from PBS later this month, including NOVA, Carrier, Scientific American Frontiers, and Wired Science. Frankly, I couldn’t care less. I’ll be watching the Daily Show.
I guess you are eating your words ..
Rad. Rad. Rad. I LIKED Hulu from the beginning (at least since I first played with it: http://1to10rev...-video-website/) and this makes me more happy than ever.
Thanks for the update.
I have been waiting for weeks for TechCrunch to put up a post about Hulu!
But unfortunately you give them credit when they should be slammed along with SciFi. (I know Hulu is a JV but who made the decision to delay online delivery of Battlestar mid-season?)
Battlestar Galactica is almost 2 years behind here in Australia so I used to have to buy the whole series on DVD when I was in the USA. To keep up with this years series I began by watching and then downloading pirated episodes on various websites.
I then discovered Hulu and with HotSpot Shield (which gives me a US IP address) I can happily watch legal episodes along with some ads. The Battlestar Galactica episode would be up on SciFi and Hulu the same night as the broadcast screening.
That is until around 4 weeks ago when suddenly and without warning – NOTHING was posted. I checked message boards, search, the official sites and NOTHING, Nada, Zilch!!!
Weeks later a broadcast timetable goes up on the Hulu Battlestar Galactica page which shows episodes will now go up online 2 weeks after they are screen on TV!!!! How stupid are these people? Just when you think they get it they stick their middle finger in the air at their loyal viewers.
Myself and thousand and thousand of others have now gone back to pirated streams and downloads of the episodes so we can stay in touch. Ridiculous situation.
I would happily watch more targeted ads online, on demand wen I want to rather than visiting dodgy websites with dubious popups etc.
Now why haven’t you or anybody else talked about this?
for me it was over when they managed to get search inside Embed players before YouTube and that in their roadmap the promise of a better full screen experience direct from the Embed players was the next to come.
That was last week. so my own “it is over” was some days before you.
It would be really nice if they started licencing content for people outside of the US. I know it’s hard, but here in Australia we don’t get the Daily Show on regular TV.
But are they delivering any live events? that’s when they really become internet tv and not just another aggregator.
That is great News! Love TDS and Colbert….now Hulu has to get rid of their Region block.
Content is king.
Some sports can demand huge amounts for TV rights because people want that content and will go wherever they need to (and pay whatever they have to?) to get it.
You should also have a look at their Compete chart. Every one of my friends I have told about Hulu loves it although they need more content. I have been watching the last comic standing and the moment of truth on Hulu, and I am not even annoyed by the occasional ads.
Hey if you want to watch Hulu outside of North America just download and install HotSpot Shield and bingo! It gives you a US IP address and it is a god send.
You can get it here – http://hotspotshield.com/
Unfortunately it doesn’t work on SciFi as they must be using a more sophisticated method of detecting region.
I would cut my wrists if I had to put up with the crap and 2-3 year behind programming here in Australia!
ENJOY!
All ridiculous region coding like that does is drive people to BitTorrent. Why not open it up to the world so at least you can hit them with whatever advertising you have going? Seems so silly to me to have the region coding in there at all…
Viacom put all the episodes of the Daily Show online last fall at http://www.thedailyshow.com/ – unless I’m missing something from your post, Hulu isn’t streaming content that isn’t available elsewhere. I’ll echo Gretchen, Hulu has yet to prove that they are anything more than just another video aggregator, and what’s more, they are a far cry from being a leader in that market.
http://slashdot...251&tid=188
Ok, it’s nothing new to watch full episodes of The Daily Show and the Colbert Report on the Internet. In the past, if I’ve missed a Colbert episode, I just went to comedycentral.com and watched the full episode there.
I suppose Hulu earns my view now though, because their videos are slightly larger than comedycentral.com’s. It’s still not going to replace my television though.
By the way, the fullscreen view resolution is terrible, which is typical for about all flash video sites.
You missed out some words.
“Game over. Hulu Wins *in the US*”
The rest of the world is pretty big (hard to believe, I know) and Hulu doesn’t broadcast out here yet.
HD video streaming through Silverlight is the answer to great, high quality video online.
Major League Baseball is using it for high quality streaming and on demand video, so has the BBC in the UK and I think NBA are soon to do something.
I also think the NBC Olympics website will be utilising the full capabilities of Silverlight for great Interet TV viewing.
In my humble consumer opinion, Flash video sucks (for high quality)!
Worthless news to those outside of the US.
This has been coming for a long time and is great news. This is only the beginning in the amount of media you will be able to consume on the net – with the quality getting better as well.
They are probably keeping only a fraction of the revenue they get.. media providers and off site distributors will eat a huge chunk.
I’d choose BT/tivo over Hulu because I liked a locally stored copy and BT is prolly faster than Hulu, especially during peak hours. Also, no advertisement.
US media providers make $$$ by selling their crap internationally. Non us people won’t get Hulu… unless they use an us proxy.
@Martin_Australia
You should do a little more research before you post. The BBC is standardizing on Flash Video (e.g. http://www.itwr...com/blog/?p=553)
In addition “Flash Video” as yo describe it includes H.264 which has excellent HD quality. Don’t judge all codecs by YouTube’s and other web site’s choice of using by default a codec that is many years old. If you must compare Flash Video with Silverlight you should use the newest codec (AAC/H.264 vs. VC-1) of each of the contenders. My 6 months old 17″ Intel PowerBook screen has a much higher resolution than my 10 year old SVGA CRT monitor.
… and I heard that you can watch YouTube in higher-resolution mode with some URL patching tricks.
Now if they can only make money. Last week their ad inventory ran out and instead they had to do station bumps.
Still georetarded.
NBB – sure, but look at the experience. The shows aren’t just available on dailyshow, you can also dig them up on video sharing sites that ignore DMCAs. That’s why tivo or bittorent are the way to go for on demand. Hulu, however, is awesome, despite the ads. Or in other words, the ads cost less in terms of friction than downloading on bittorent and dealing with the file. At least for daily shows where there’s a lot of them to deal with.
Unfortunately Hulu won’t let you watch from outside the US.
The snippets on Comedy Central are impossible to watch from here because their player doesn’t buffer enough.
A tip, though: I’ve discovered that it is possible to watch Stewart and Colbert from abroad at http://www.spike.com.
What has happened to the one that skype founders started?
Great quality both technical delivery and content, especially that they bring PBS and Discovery. Only problem so far is the limitation on how many episodes of each they have.
If we could really get all this content with full roster of episodes, bye bye TV.
Ronen
As long as they don’t go international they still suck.
Poor Hulu, $100 million war chest, and they have to cover their ears when people outside of U. S. practically scream for access.
You can bet Screen Actors Guild lawyers are watching Hulu with eagle eyes because Hulu is precisely the reason SAG is about to go on strike for.
A bizarre scenario would have Hulu’s backers NBC and Fox “cook” Hulu’s accounting so it would not show it made “too much money”, because SAG could say, “Yo, where is my slice?”
Hulu won’t open up to the markets outside U. S. because the studios do not dare breach their territorial contracts to fan the flames of not just Screen Actors Guild, but all movie industry unions.
How ironic that Hulu, a web property set up by old media to compete in the new digital reality, is being held back by the good old media itself.
“Game over. Hulu Wins”
The game just began…maybe I’d agree with the title if it read, “Hulu is now a serious contender” (in the limited on-demand game).
As both Hulu and BitTorrent continue to grow/evolve, it’ll be impossible to declare a winner anytime soon, especially this year.
Hulu only maintains the media rights for a certain period of time. Content EXPIRES, as long as Hulu faces the uphill (never ending) battle for rights to distribute content when and where its users demand the content; Hulu will never be a true on-demand library.
Movies on Hulu are 4+ years old on *average* (correct me if i’m wrong). How is this a true advantage over BitTorrent? The only thing that Hulu has an advantage over is immediate streaming of *limited* content to the general public. It’s still a limited experience, but if it serves the GP, then it is a true contender.
iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix (and vudu), may be pay-on-demand, but it’s an uninterrupted experience, and the content is always available, and the library keeps growing, instead of expiring. The success of these types of services come down to the deals brokered with the studios, and meeting the appropriate long term agreements that are inline with the contractual obligations of the holders of the media rights.
Either way, we can still surf torrent libraries, and queue up any number of pieces of content. Whether it’s tonights Daily Show or Colbert Report, or Kung Fu Panda that was just released last week in theaters. It may not be on demand, but it’s fresh and new…that’s where content is king. As soon as it’s in the local torrent library, it’s there (illegally/legally) until deleted by the end user.
Torrent simply doesn’t cater to the GP, so those of us who have streamlined our ability to acquire true on-demand content for our ever growing library, we’ll be the only ones reaping the benefits.
However, companies like VUZE (Azureus), are making it easier to manage the process of acquiring new high quality content to stream to our media/entertainment centers at home, so *stay tuned* for new enhancement to evolve this process.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Hulu, I’m actually a frequent user (3-7 TV shows a week, 1 movie a month), but it hardly competes with a HQ/HD library via DVD and torrents. I like surround sound and high-quality, high-resolution video; a couple more key requirements that Hulu falls short on (serious hardware, technology and hardware limitations).
Bottom line, limited experiences (i.e. Hulu) are never winners.
If Hulu wins, you lose. With Hulu being US only (and no way will that open up under the copyright and distribution regime the industry has created itself), and broadcasters still thinking they can control distribution, tv-downloads via Bittorrent are going mainstream in the rest of the world the same way mp3 downloads have done.
This will mean the only place in the world where people will swallow the kind of restrictions Hulu imposes will be the US. The rest of the world will get used to being free to play their media anytime, anywhere, legally or not, and will never accept the restrictive regime imposed by Hulu.
@Duncan: “georetarded”. Brilliant!
TDS and Colbert Report rock, I can’t get enough of both shows, I usually manage to watch them every night. In regards to Hulu, its pretty cool, except that I noticed they increased the amount of ads they put in. I managed to pick up on Arrested Development and American Dad (awesome shows btw).
My only complaint about the ads is that they should have stayed with the 5 second sponsor messages instead of the 25 second car ads. I think 5 seconds strikes the right balance between tolerable and annoying.
LA TIMES: Blogger’s Silicon Valley clout gets politicians talking –
Michael Arrington landed interviews with most of the major contenders for the White House to weigh in for his ‘tech president’ primary.
http://www.lati...?track=ntothtml
TheDailyShow.com and TheColbertReport.com now also stream FULL episodes of their shows. This in addition to all the seperate clips they already showed.
And these full episode streams DO work outside the US.
So I don’t get what the big deal with Hulu is… Seams unlikely to me that Hulu doens’t have the proper rights to show Stewart and Colbert outside the US. They just block all of their content for non-US audiences. They should start blocking access at a show by show basis.
Your prior whining is kind of pathetic. Before actually seeing the site, you beat on it until your knuckles are bloodied and broken. And yet, what happens when it’s live? High resolution streaming episodes of major network shows, for free, with limited ads, with great bandwidth so we don’t have to worry about buffering, and an ever-increasing library of current and historical shows. Hulu is great; it’s free, the ads are very limited, the video is fast loading and high quality, and the content is great. I think you may want to consider apologizing for the totally unwarranted bashing you linked to in this post.
Until Hulu streams to the UK, Hulu sucks. And I believe the Swahili for “cease & desist” is actually “lithethwe”
jonsocko – the only reason i trashed it before seeing the site is because they kept missing their promised launch dates.
here’s my apology….it’s coming…wait for it…..keep hitting refresh….
There was a New York Times article about The Daily Show no longer cutting up the show into multiple videos to appease the cable companies and the agreement they had with them. Seems like Viacom managed some deal to get their content wherever they please… or are betting that the agreement with the cable companies doesn’t state what Big Cable thinks it means.
At any rate, I enjoy using Hulu for the 4 or 5 shows it has on there that I watch with regularity and re-living my childhood with the occasional WKRP or Who’s The Boss episode. It’d be nice if I could get CBS shows on there as well… and MTV shows, both of which are currently online but require me to use only their site. What I’m trying to say is, I want my TV on my Internet.
And then I want an easy way to get those streams on my TV.
The content and the player on Hulu are great (auto-resuming if you leave the site? Winner.), but the site around the player could use some major help. They need a major usability overhaul. The Office has the same weight as Diff’rent Strokes on the site? What’chu talkin’ ’bout, Hulu?
I’m just glad that ugly guy has stopped leaving dreadful video comments made while in bed!
And, and, and another thing, suddenly deciding a service doesn’t suck because it has The Daily Show, is kinda lame. Will their service begin to suck when it disappears off their show list?
“Hulu is also adding a few shows from PBS later this month, including NOVA, Carrier, Scientific American Frontiers, and Wired Science. Frankly, I couldn’t care less. I’ll be watching the Daily Show.”
which just proves what a completely useless prat you really are! isn’t it about time your parents took your computer away and made you do homework?
yeah, but still a very stupid service sience its beeing ofered only in US.
this is what happens when internet is misunderstood.
Yeah, ok – get me an appleTV hack or netflix like box and I’ll stop bitching… I hate watching this stuff on my laptop. I know, I know – I’m so old.
It’s not international (i.e. outside the U.S., the rest of the world).
I’ll keep downloading torrents and checking thedailyshow.com.
Hulu loses. Game over.
They are censoring people that do not happen to have an IP address that is in the US. That’s a pretty bad thing IMHO
When will people stop doing rubbish like this??? You really want me to go through a proxy, or log into a US computer just so I can view your website?
Big fat failure.
Mike no one has said anything how Joost doesn’t have the Daily Show or the Colbert Report and they are partners with Viacom and Viacom also has a significant investment in Joost .The best Joost can come up with is Comedy Centrals Stella despite many ex-MTV networks execs now work for Joost .
If you want to give Joost the same treatment you gave HULU go for it
hulu still sucks until they allow canadians to view their content.
Glad they are adding NOVA and the like.
What made the difference for me is that Hulu runs on a Linux box. Joost does not – and apparently has no plans to.
dang, hulu is only for the us of a … weird
Tom G.
Check http://www.joos...ys-about-linux/
Seems that the first answer was mis informed.
H
Of all the people, why Colbert for crying out load?
JT
http://www.Privacy-center.net
Mike,
You haven’t just been hard you’ve been terribly wrong. That’s even worse.