Hulu to Launch for Reals

The NY Times mentions that Hulu.com is finally being made available to the general public. I signed up a year ago and was invited to join the beta version. Hulu, for those of you not in the know, is a streaming video website created by Fox and NBC Universal to stream television and film, supported by ads, and thus providing a free video on demand service. The real reason this service was created though, was to compete with and stave off file sharing sites.

We've been using Hulu for a while. I have an old desktop computer plugged into the PC input in the back of the living room television allowing us to view services like Amazon Unbox, iTunes, and Netflix as though we were watching old fashioned cable.

Hulu so far is a moderate success from the viewers standpoint. Locating content is easy enough, and the media player is cross platform working both on a Mac or with Windows, and in Firefox as well as IE6. Hulu has a full screen mode for viewing content, though I have found this sometimes crashes the player during a transition between the content and the advertisement. Otherwise, the streaming is high quality, instantaneous, and generally simple to use.

My biggest complaint with Hulu has been management of content. I started watching Arrested Development at lunch a few months back. I never watched the show before, but heard good things. Indeed, turns out I love this show. I watched the first season on Hulu, and the first five episodes of season 2. The next available episodes are the first five episodes of season 3. Arrested Development, in case you have never seen it, relies on an evolving plot throughout the season. Each episode is essentially a continuation of the next unlike the self contained episodes of a show like Law and Order, where the plot of each episode is resolved by the closing credits. I was not the only viewer leaving crass comments demanding the remainder of Season 2 and 3 be made available (Hulu subsequently removed said comments).

I suspected that my experience with Arrested Development was the result of some executive deciding that Hulu might be one great advert for DVDs. The Times essentially confirms this:

"One challenge Hulu faces is building a predictable and stable library of content. To protect DVD and Web download sales, media companies often make TV shows and films available free on the Web for certain periods of time and then remove them. For example, there are 11 episodes of the TV show “24” on Hulu — beginning with episode 18 of the first season."

There you have it. Hulu is limiting availability in the hope of selling DVDs. So as it is now, I have watched a season and a half of Arrested Development futilely waiting for the next episodes to made available on Hulu. I have no intention of buying the DVD, because I Hate DVDs.

For Hulu to be a success, executives will need to treat it as a primary revenue stream, not as an oversized advertisement for DVD sales. The Times is right in asserting that customers will be alienated if shows disappear. Also, by making available shows, users like me are perhaps more likely to watch other content from the studios.

For instance, I had not seen 30 Rock, an NBC show until a few days ago. 30 Rock season 1 is available through Netflix, a service that I subscribe to. I watched the entire first season in a weekend. However, even though I think its one of the best shows on television, I'm not going to jump into season 2 without watching the first episodes of the season. Hulu has some episodes from this season available, but not the first half dozen, meaning, I won't be watching NBC when new episodes air, and I won't be watching the few episodes currently on Hulu. Eventually, I assume, the entirety of 30 Rock season 2 will be available from either Netflix or on Hulu. But until then, I won't be a regular viewer.

Hulu is a great initial foray by an old media company into modern technology. But it is still just a baby step. Users will not stick around forever waiting for content. To compete with file sharing and torrent sites, Hulu needs to step up and make more content available, permanently, and immediately, otherwise the site will soon become another failed attempt by old men in suits rather than a destination for the next generation of media consumption.

I Hate DVDs

DVDs were a great follow up to VHS tapes. VHS tapes were bulky, broke easily, didn't play in a computer, and took up plenty of storage space. The DVD on the other hand, is compact, maintained picture quality over years of use, and was easily played in a college dorm via a computer. But now DVDs are obsolete, and not just because high definition discs are going to replace them. Physical media, DVD or Blu-Ray discs, simply are irrelevant.

Many things have changed since the debut of the DVD. Portable media players, mostly the iPod, but also Zunes and Playstation Portables, are ubiquitous devices. Yet content on a DVD, thanks to digital rights restrictions, can't be transferred to an iPod (at least not easily and legally). Music CDs still have significant value in the age of Mp3 players because the CD's content can be transferred to a player easily. The CD is then a backup copy of the content that can be safely stored only to be called upon in the case of a hardware failure.

The same is not true of DVDs. A DVD needs to be easily accessible to watch the content rather than stashed in the back of a closet or under a bed, meaning my library of DVDs consumes a large block of bookshelf space I rather have books on. Additionally, finding the DVD I want to watch, or even browsing the library I have, is a major task since DVDs are stacked two deep. By contrast, a digital library can easily be browsed, searched and instantly accessed with a remote or a mouse.

In the DVD's heyday, computer hard drives were smaller, and prohibitively expensive to amass a library of DVD quality movies. Physical discs were cheap to manufacture and provided a great alternative. But now, terabyte hard drives, enough storage for hundreds of DVDs, cost fifty to seventy cents a gigabyte. In comparison, my six year old desktop came with a hard drive with 4 percent of that storage space, or enough for maybe 5 DVD quality movies, cost about $3 per gigabyte.

Movie studios want us all to buy the next generation laser disc, the Blu-Ray format from Sony. Not only do players cost several hundreds of dollars, movies on the discs cost about twice as much as standard DVDs. And on top of that, Blu-Ray discs still can't be transfered to iPods and still require the disc to play the movie.

The alternative is clear: digital videos over the internet. iTunes is one alternative, though this locks users into using an iPod for portable media. Amazon's service works smoothly for the most part, but is incompatible with iPods. There are rental models too, like Netflix which streams video on demand, and also cable service video on Demand which doesn't require a computer at all. All of these services, especially when used in tandem, are far superior to DVDs. There is no collection of discs taking up valuable real estate. Libraries are indexed and easily searched or browsed. In short, its time to say goodbye to the DVD.

You were a good friend DVD, but sadly, I won't really miss you.