

Is Hulu Driving People Back to Piracy? - edgefield
http://newteevee.com/2009/02/21/is-hulu-driving-people-back-to-piracy/

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endtime
First of all, it's important to differentiate between Hulu and its content
partners. I'm willing to bet Jason Kilar didn't make this call.

Second, yes, it is a stupid move that shows a lack of foresight. In five or
ten years, everyone will have their TV connected to a free web-based source of
content. If the content owners wise up, then it will be their source
(something like Hulu) and they'll get some ad revenue. If not, then it will be
a pirate source instead. As we saw with Napster.....(four years)....iTMS, the
sooner the content owners accept the inevitable the sooner they stop losing
money.

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pavelludiq
Hulu is a U.S. service only. Should i find a way to trick hulu that i am from
the US, or should i just do a google search with "torrent" at the end of the
query?

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dhughes
The Greasemonkey extension for Firefox with the 'IMDB Pirated Version' script
is great, you go to IMDB read about a movie and the script puts a link at the
top of the page to any website with a torrent of the movie.

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someperson
'Pirates of the Amazon' does the same thing to Amazon.com.

IIRC the site was shut down recently, but i think the extension still works

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mikeyur
One thing people have to realize is that this wasn't so much a Hulu decision
as it was a Network decision.

The networks want to control where you view the hulu content (at your
computer). If you're watching it on TV you may as well be paying for cable (in
their minds).

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mattmaroon
You're making an arbitrary distinction there since the networks own Hulu.
They're just doing some good cop bad cop PR, and you're falling for it.

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asciilifeform
What do you mean, "back to"?

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chris11
South Park is a really great example of how to do online television from a
user's perspective.

1\. They are really good about getting episodes up quickly.

2\. It's high quality.

3\. Episodes are never taken down.

4\. It's ad free.

<http://www.southparkstudios.com/>

Now granted it doesn't deal with big media's concerns. It's not set up to make
money. There are no ads, and the show archive is great, so it could be argued
that it removes incentive to by season dvds. think Matt Stone and Troy Parker
might be making a little money because of it, but it's from product sales, not
from ads.

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dangrover
Hmm, last time I watched it, they had ads.

I do agree that it's excellent that they don't take episodes down. If the
episode isn't available online, I'm not going to go watch it on TV. Hulu could
learn a lesson.

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vaksel
No, it never did anything for piracy, because it didn't have as much content.
I'd venture a guess that most piracy is for brand new movies, not single
episodes of shows(for most shoes, some exceptions like Entourage exist
obviously)

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rationalbeaver
Actually, I think you'd be surprised how often this happens:

1\. New episode of favorite show airs

2\. Forget to record.

3\. Look on network site, not up yet.

4\. Look on Hulu, not there either.

5\. Pirate Bay and done.

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nazgulnarsil
bad move from the online community. Hulu represents a tenuous olive branch
between online content watchers and the big media interests. If this gets
screwed up it will be another 5 years before tv gets into the 21st century.

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chris11
I wouldn't take it that seriously. Most pirates want access to high quality
material, when they want it. Sure, if Hulu screws up, it will probably take a
while for big media to try something like it again. But I think pirates would
accept something new pretty quickly.

It's incredibly easy to get something off bittorrent, so there's no risk in
trying a new website. Hulu seems to value their user's trust a lot. It's
really nice, and shows intent. But I don't need to have a lot of trust to use
Hulu. If I don't like how they let me access a tv show, I can just use some
frictionless means to get it a couple hours later.

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kubrick
In a word: yes.

