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Site Plans Hundreds of TV Shows Online

Tue Mar 11, 2008 1:56 PM EDT
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Associated Press
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LOS ANGELES — Hulu.com, a joint venture between News Corp. and NBC Universal, plans to open its vast online library of ad-supported TV shows and movies to the public on Wednesday, the company announced.

Users of the service will be able to view more than 250 full-length episodes of shows such as "The Simpsons" and "The Office," as well as some 100 movies, including "The Big Lebowski" and "Ice Age."

Short clips from films and TV shows such as "Napoleon Dynamite" and "Saturday Night Live" are also available through the service, which is accessible at Hulu.com, as well as on America Online, Yahoo and other popular Web portals.

The public debut of Hulu, which has been available to a test group by invitation since October, comes as studios seek ways to make money providing online content.

The entertainment companies behind the service have been feuding with popular online video sites such as YouTube, where unauthorized clips from shows often appear.

The Hulu.com programming comes from 50 TV networks, movie studios and Web-based producers of content.

Viewers of some movies and TV shows are given a choice of advertisements to watch.

© 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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macemoneta

Great, another crappy little flash player app, and no full screen option (not that I have enough CPU power to run Flash at fullscreen).

This is better than p2p because... it's so inconvenient? It can't be moved to a PMP? It consumes so much more resource than a video file (which I can view fullscreen)?

/sarcasm/ With selling points like that, it can't fail. \sarcasm\

  • 1 vote
Reply#1 - Tue Mar 11, 2008 6:00 PM EDT
tjackson

For one you can watch it full screen. I have been using it since October 29, 2007. The show looks good. You should try it before commenting about it. There is one thing they need to add more shows faster.

    #1.1 - Tue Mar 11, 2008 10:26 PM EDT
    macemoneta

    I did try it, just before I commented. At least on my platform (Linux/Firefox) there was no fullscreen option for playback.

    Even if there was, Flash is a resource hog, and from experience with other media sites, I would need to buy a new machine to play it fullscreen. Since that is the only driver for an upgrade, it's not justifiable. I do everything else (video encoding, compiling kernels, running virtual systems, playing 1920x1200 fullscreen video) with no problem.

    Flash looks like a slideshow at full screen, and the Adobe developers admit they have a long way to go with hardware acceleration. Right now, most of the processing is done on the CPU, not the GPU. A fullscreen normal video at 1920x1200 runs my CPU at about 30%, while the small default Flash window pins the CPU at 100% and makes doing other activities while playing very laggy.

    Flash has its place. It's just not ready to be the media player of choice. That will likely change in a few years, but that makes businesses that are using it for TV/Movie content today a little too far ahead of the technology. Remember that portable internet devices (like the new EeePC) will be using Intel's Atom processors soon. Because of the in-order instruction execution, Flash will get even harder to support.

    • 1 vote
    #1.2 - Tue Mar 11, 2008 11:39 PM EDT
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