Someone out there, please help me with this because… uh… I just don’t get it.
You may recall that NBC and Apple had a bit of a disagreement recently on content recently. NBC said that Apple wasn’t being fair about pricing. Apple said that NBC wanted touch consumers in their swimsuit place and make them pay for the privilege. As I recall, one of the ideas NBC was pursuing was “bundling” a successful show with a piece of crap that NBC can’t get people to watch for free, kind of like those “two great movies!” deals you find at Costco that’s almost invariably a classic shrink-wrapped to something idiots wouldn’t hang from their rear-view mirror to get that way cool blinding rainbow effect. I think I might have read somewhere about NBC asking for stricter DRM as well.
At any rate, a deal was decidedly not reached and (depending on who you hear it from), NBC either took it’s ball and went home or Apple tried to jam a doorknob up NBC’s ass on their way out. Keep in mind here: there is nowhere, let me repeat that: NOWHERE on the Internet where you can purchase television programs the day after they air. Never mind the video quality, never mind the lack of commercials. If you want to own it, put it on your personal media player to watch on the bus, stream it to your television, whatever, you have exactly two choices: iTunes and bittorrent.
Aside: yes, I know you can buy DVD’s and rip them and I understand that there are multiple ways to capture video to your PC or Mac. I’m speaking to that group of people who lack the savvy, the patience, or who don’t like stealing. Personally, I’m in the last two categories.
So you have your two choices: iTunes and bittorrent. One makes money, the other doesn’t. Sure, maybe NBC doesn’t make as much money as they’d like from iTunes, but the last time I checked, something was better than nothing. So, what do you think NBC did about that? They created Hulu (Now there’s a descriptive name! Really tells you what it’s all about, doesn’t it? They could have just as easily called it Bingely Bongely, or Framzamr! Because dropping the e before the r and exclamation points is totally web 2.0) which, as far as I can tell, pretty much tries to repeat the whole television experiment on your computer.
That’s right, you get commercials! And because everyone longs for the days when a 19 inch television was freaking huge, you get to watch in a tiny window in your browser. You don’t need to worry about complicated things like iPods, you can’t download the video anyway (Yet. More on that thought in a minute). Oh, you were going to spend a week with the in-laws in Buttfuck, Minnesota? Wow, bummer dude. Hope you like playing backgammon with your father-in-law because if they don’t have a pretty hefty pipe to the Internet you ain’t hiding in the guest room watching any fucking Jack Bauer or Peter Griffin, okay?
But it’s free! Totally free! That is, if you can get in on the closed beta (also totally web 2.0). Or, then again, you could just traipse on over to OpenHulu, and watch a bunch of Hulu content for, uh, nothing. Because in keeping with this web 2.0 thingy, NBC wants you to imbed Hulu content so people can share stuff (that’s the most web 2.0 thing of all!). So a person could conceivably completely avoid Hulu’s web site entirely. Now I always kind of thought that one of the central ideas of web commerce was to get people to actually, you know, go to your web site but I’m just some blogger. What do I know?
But here’s where I start to really lose the trail on this: there are any number of apps and applets out there that make it trivially easy to download embedded media. Last time I looked there were at least four or five Firefox extensions alone specifically for this. Some of the better ones will even transcode the media into whatever you want to watch, or transfer, or archive or share. How long before someone figures out how to do that for Hulu video? It plays in a regular web browser, not a dedicated client, (at least the shared embedded video does, I don’t actually know how Hulu proper does it) so someone out there’s got to be smart enough to intercept the stream. I’m guessing it’s got some form of DRM and everybody knows how totally rock solid infallible that shit is.
My guess is that by the time Hulu is open to the public there will be a small handful of ways to automatically grab and transcode the video. Though why you would is a good question. I mean, if you’re going to steal media (can you steal something that someone is basically giving away?) you may as well take the extra step and steal the HD version via bittorrent. I’m not advocating that, mind, but as far as I can tell, NBC hasn’t left people who actually want to pay for content any way to actually do so.
So in a nutshell: NBC wanted more money. Because they couldn’t peddle crazy-ass schemes to Apple to get more money they pulled all their content from the only place on the Intarweb where people have demonstrated a desire to actually pay for shit they could almost just as easily steal. And just to show that meanie Steve Jobs, they started up their own video store where they could pursue all their crazy ideas and show him who’s boss. No, wait, that would actually make sense. No, they came up with a plan to, you know, like, uh, give it away. With… ads.
Is there something I’m not seeing here? Because to me, it looks like the Emperor ain’t just naked, he’s also about as bright as the inside of boot.
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