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NBC's Hulu Private Beta Goes Live
Saving corn farmers one TV show at a time...

NBC recently demanded that the FCC force broadband providers to ban pirated traffic on their networks, using the argument that said trading hurts corn farmers by cannibalizing movie theater revenue. They also suggested putting filters in routers. NBC then went on to pull their video content from iTunes just as TV season arrived, driving many of those users to the very pirated services NBC loathes.

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Obviously, giving pirates somewhere to get video besides p2p networks would be a good first step in the quest to help the impoverished corn farmer. For NBC, that effort is named Hulu, and according to the developers, the service entered private beta today:
quote:
Starting today, we are sending out invitations which will allow users to access the private beta at Hulu.com. If you haven't signed up, you can do so by visiting Hulu.com. . . . Not everyone will receive an invitation to the private beta today, but we will be ramping up the number of invitations to the private beta each week.
Aspects of the service are a lot like YouTube, but users can't upload content. Hulu offers film, TV and short video content from a number of companies, though it only offers up the five most recent episodes of TV series. If all goes well, it should be out of beta and available to the general public within a few months.

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amungus
Premium Member
join:2004-11-26
America

3 recommendations

amungus

Premium Member

a beta service?

Ok, so they want to control distribution. Fine. That's cool. They ought to be able to deliver their own stuff, and be able to see how many people watched... no problem with that.

But a "beta" service for a few shows? Come on. This is 2007, almost 2008.

It's painfully obvious that people want some very simple things.

1) a whole show, in a viewable format, no drm.
2) an easy way to get it
3) free would be preferrable

How hard can it be to encode some shows, even WITH commercials, and let people download the whole thing? Sure, do some streaming for the ultra lazy, but at least make it able to do full screen, not some lame Flash window the size of a credit card.

I just fail to understand the reasoning behind waiting to do something that "pirates" have already figured out, and have been doing for ...years?

Here's another thought... Hire some of these people who have nothing better to do than encode their favorite shows. Give them a few bucks, have them do the encoding.

How hard can it be to do this right? I just don't get it. Why not offer a decent service? Why all the little baby steps when the technology has existed for years to do this right?

Heck, why not offer official torrents? They can still track those right? I'd be willing to bet that people would actually download the "official" thing, even with ads, if it were of fair quality, free, and had come from an "official" source...

Good luck on this 'service' ...I hope somebody figures out how to do it right someday. Til then, guess I'll just keep using my regular ol' DVR from Cox and the always handy fast forward button.