Throwing Voodoo at Hulu
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Impressions: Dissecting media business and business media.
Throwing Voodoo at Hulu
The networks thought they had Web distribution figured out—until they met Boxee.
By Paul Smalera
Posted Monday, February 23, 2009 - 5:00pm
Like 64 million other American households, mine has cable television, and I'm aghast at how much money I fork over for the privilege of watching The Real Housewives of New York City. With the DVR HD cable box, the sports package, broadband Internet, and the rental fee for that obscenely bloated remote control, I'm out $120 a month—and that includes a discount I received after threatening to cancel and switch to satellite. Even though I can't get satellite in my building. I bluffed because the cable industry is effectively a monopoly and treats its customers accordingly.
A decent chunk of us 64 million would probably choose an alternative, if one existed. And for the past four months or so, one has. It's called Boxee, and FOX, NBC, and possibly Comcast and Time Warner tried to kill it last week. It's a good example of the Internet's creatively destructive force; whenever traditional media companies try to either capture or stifle it, the Web snaps up to bite them somewhere else.
Boxee is a free program that stitches together the best music, video, and movie Web sites with your local media files (photos, music) into an interface you can navigate with fewer remote-control buttons than there are fingers on your hands. The interface is powerful and couch-friendly. But the site in Boxee's lineup that transformed it into an embryonic cable killer was Hulu.
Hulu's Web site has a slew of licensed and advertising-supported movies and TV shows. Launched last March, Hulu was conceived by News Corp. and NBC Universal, the respective parents of FOX and NBC, because they were sick of seeing their expensive content on YouTube.
Hulu was designed to let viewers instantly watch and manipulate content made for TV on their computers. Boxee effectively reverses the process, making Hulu play nicely on TV, where couch potatoes like me can enjoy it.
The problem is that News Corp. and NBC Universal never intended for users to experience Hulu this way. Hulu wasn't created to solve the problem of nerds wanting to watch Heroes on computers hooked up to their TVs. Cable shells out billions of dollars a year to put TV content on TVs.
Comments
Don't let people bundle...
It seems to me if the cable companies really wanted to protect their core products they should offer a top of the line internet connection for say, $100/month with the idea that, yes, this will cannibalize our cable and phone, but then throw in cable and phone for free. Internet is the only service that isn't in dire jeopardy right now. They could still offer cable and phone as stand alone products, but since internet essentially duplicates them they will die. Meanwhile, the cable companies save a little bit of the cable industry and some bandwidth. Sure, lots of people will download shows when they want, but every person who watches a show at it's regular time gets to still feed off that one set of cable signals instead of each show being an individual download. The move could fend off companies like Skype, who rely on you already having an internet connection. The other bundle carriers could try to offer just internet at a cheaper cost, but they would risk eroding their own base. The government, meanwhile, should straighten out the regulation of the industry. The reason you bill is so complicated is all the little charges the government tacks on. Depending on whether you are a phone carrier or a cable company you have to charge different fees for the same services, for instance, the government requires phone carriers to provide 'life line' services to some phone customers, including the disabled and the elderly. It costs a fraction of what regular phone services cost, but cable companies (and cell phone carriers for that matter) don't have to offer a similar service.
Nixing Boxee Won't Save Cable (ha!ha!)
Hi Paul, I had to chuckle while listening to the podcast (On the Media Feb 27). I've been watching TV thru the internet ON my TV screen for over a year now and I'm no tech wiz. I have an old (five year? six?) laptop that sits on the shelf below my TV. The two are connected via a simple S-cable...I simply took the end that was stuck in my DVD player and plugged it into my old laptop...and promptly got rid of the DVD player. (It was redundant given that laptops also play DVDs....). I go to the control panel in my computer, click on monitor/display, and click to use the TV as my "monitor" (or display content on the laptop and TV both). And the TV I now watch is BETTER, thank-you Hulu, Fancast, TV.com, ABC.com, not to mention the far-superior VIP.TV-video.net with a selection that's 10-fold that of the others. (Though not free -for the equivalent of 14 euro's - around $18 - I bought 750 points in July. They deduct 2 pts to access, for the next 24 hrs, each [ad-free] episode.) Now I only watch shows I truly enjoy and I do it on my schedule with no forethought (forget Tvio!). I have all the sites bookmarked - little icons that run across the browser's toolbar (Firefox), which I can open in multiple tabs and switch back-n-forth between. I have a remote control for my laptop, but haven't bothered to program it yet. As far as I'm concerned, one-stop shopping has already arrived!!
Hulu & Boxee
Hi Paul, I listened to your podcast interview on NPR and half way through the interview you have made a very important observation - that Netbooks with prices @ $300 start becoming very attractive to be the "STB". I think this will be a serious threat with potential impact to several people both downsides and upsides. In this cost-cutting season, consumers may choose to double up their netbooks for watching TV. May be having accessories such as Dock Stations that will connect to TVs and with a remote control? Regards Ashu
Hulu
I want to request that from now on when your reporters cover emerging TV access, like Hulu or even TVIO that you ask them if they support captioning of their videos. Neither one does. Tvio has captioning ONLY if you watch off the tvio, if you transfer the recording in any manner, the Tvio strips the captions. Hulu has no feature whatsoever that allows you to view the captions that ALL of this content has when it plays live on tv. As for Boxie, who knows? You left that out of your story.
Closed Captioning on Hulu
Actually, I just went to Hulu and clicked on the support/FAQ link b/c I thought I recalled seeing "cc" options on the site. Hulu does have closed-captioning for some of the shows, which (they state) they're trying to expand, but note that cc-data used for broadcast TV doesn't translate easily to an online format. They also give detailed explanations of how to filter your search to programs with cc only, how to set it as a default preference, how to turn it on in the viewer, and offer a link to Tech Support for further questions/concerns. I'm really less interested in defending Hulu than in defending accuracy. Now that the general public has the opportunity to put into the public medium our ten cents (or $10) worth on virtually any topic, we also have the responsibility - whether we shoulder it or not - to fact-check ourselves (particularly in instances when it is quite easy to do so) before passing on incorrect information.