Technomaly » hulu

Your Hulu Viewing Experience is About to Get Better

J. Matthew Zoss — Thu, 13 May 2010 14:58:15 +0000

I watch a lot of shows on Hulu, because watching shows when The Man says you have to is for suckers. The unfortunate downside to my strategy is that many times, the Hulu viewing experience kinda blows. It has a tendency to pause and stutter, and my the less powerful of my two laptops can’t even run it full-screen. Therefore, the news that Hulu is rolling out several new improvements to its viewing software has got me jumping for joy. First up is adaptive bitrate streaming. Should your connection slow, Hulu will automatically lower the resolution (from 480p to 360p) to keep the show running smoothly. This new feature is optional, but unless you’re a huge resolution snob there’s no reason not to select it.

Also included in the new version of the video player is sound normalization that means you’ll no longer be blasted by too-loud ads, subtitle support, thumbnail support for searching an episode and even a heat map that shows you the most popular scenes. There are also a few other tweaks like a bigger screen and a few retooled controls, but to sum it up you can simply say that Hulu is now better, and it gets better today.

Source: Hulu Blog

Paid Subscriptions Coming to Hulu

J. Matthew Zoss — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:12:27 +0000

Online streaming television content has changed the way many of us watch TV, and no site has had more of an impact than Hulu. The streaming TV hub currently offers content from several networks for free, with the primary restriction being a steady cycling of new and old programming. According to sources “with knowledge of the plans,” Hulu will soon be unveiling Hulu Plus, a paid subscription service that will allow greater access to older shows for a $9.99 monthly fee.

Personally, I’d be more than willing to pay $10 a month to access older content, provided that said monthly fee allowed me access to complete archives of shows I enjoy. Currently, most shows on Hulu make the five most recent episodes available. Upping that nominally to the 10 most recent shows wouldn’t be worth it, but I might even drop my Netflix account if you made complete seasons available. And would it kill you to get some Law and Order episodes up on the site? I need to keep up on New York City’s war on crime!

Image and Story Source: Lifehacker

Download Hulu Videos With StreamTransport

J. Matthew Zoss — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 15:53:48 +0000

I love Hulu, although lately I’ve been having a hard time finding anything good on the site to watch. But let’s pretend for a moment that I wanted to watch an episode of The Real Housewives of the Trailer Park (that’s a show, right?). Let’s also pretend that I know I won’t have internet access when I want to watch it. StreamTransport is the answer.

This free piece of software captures streaming video at full quality, recording the video like a TiVo. Therefore, you have to play a show in its entirety in order to record it, but hey, reality TV is good enough to watch twice, right? The recorded show is saved as am FLV file, so you’ll need a VLC player in order to watch it.

StreamTransport should work on any streaming video site, such as YouTube or any, umm… “provider of adult content.” Keep in mind that programs like these tend to get shut down by “The Man”, so you may want to enjoy this program while you can.

Story and Image Via Lifehacker

Hulu Loses Comedy Central

Asterios Kokkinos — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 11:18:40 +0000

Interestingly, I was just ruminating last night to friends about the value of having Viacom shows on Hulu, a service owned by FOX, ABC & NBC. Then this morning, we get the news that as of today, Comedy Central content will be pulled from Hulu.

This is bad news for consumers, but I honestly don’t see what choice Viacom has. Selling television shows nets the networks a fortune on iTunes, and at least on their own websites they get all of the advertising revenue from premercials and banner ads. What’s the point of licensing out their content to Hulu? It cuts into their live viewing audience, their own website and their iTunes business while offering a percentage in return as opposed to the whole profit.

Not that Apple doesn’t keep a percentage on iTunes, but at least there you’re selling the programs for $2-3 a pop.

Apparently, the door’s open for Hulu & Viacom to work together again in the future, but it honestly doesn’t make sense to me that they would unless Viacom became a shareholder in Hulu.

Source & Photo Source: Christian Science Monitor

Hulu Coming To iPad

Asterios Kokkinos — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:00:17 +0000

The good news: Hulu’s coming to the iPad, giving people one more reason to buy one of the damn things. Access to every single episode of Lost on a beautiful screen while waiting at the airport? That’s a good thing.

The bad news: they may charge money for the app, which as we all know, is free over the internet. That’s according to All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka, who says he’s got this news from multiple sources within the organization.

Makes sense to me – Hulu’s not making any money right now; it’s kind of losing its shirt in fact. Those little fifteen second commercials they run between acts of your favorite television shows aren’t making the networks much money at all, so the idea of Hulu charging a premium for iPad access makes sense. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’d be the surest way for the service to make a little cash. If you’ve got the scratch for an iPad, surely you have the $5-$10 for an app that’ll allow you to access all of Babylon 5.

Still, I’m bracing myself for the nerdrage. “Boo! Give us everything we want, right now, for free or we’ll murder you!!”

Source & Photo Source: The Christian Science Monitor

US Web Users Watched 33 Billion Online Videos in December

J. Matthew Zoss — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:00:54 +0000

More and more evidence is rolling out to prove that the internet is the greatest time-waster mankind has ever created. In the month of December 2009, 178 million internet users in the US watched 33 billion online videos. Of those 33 billion videos, 40% or 13 billion were on YouTube, making it by far the most-watched provider of online video content. The number two site for videos was Hulu, with a mere 3% of the total – of course, that still accounts for 1 billion videos.

YouTube’s 136 million unique visitors watched a staggering 97 videos per user, while Hulu’s 44 million unique viewers watched 23 videos each. The full results of the online video survey can be found here and does not contain any information about online video porn, which I assume accounts for around 80 gazillion online views per day.

Source: Download Squad