RSSHulu gets Lost and Desperate (and Mickey)
By Angela Gunn | Published April 30, 2009, 1:21 PM
They've got a mouse in the house: Hulu on Thursday announced that the scrappy streaming-video site has reached a deal with Disney in which the House That Mickey Built will take a 30% equity stake, and watching Scrubs and Ugly Betty online will take up everyone else's waking hours. The deal will include content from ABC Primetime, ABC Family, ABC Daytime, SOAPnet, Disney Channel, Walt Disney Studios and, of course, the archives thereof.
That's three of the four major networks (NBC, ABC and Fox; CBS as you'll remember went with YouTube) and over 150 content providers, for those keeping score at home. Of course, ABC also has a recent deal in place with YouTube. It's also not clear at press time what this will mean for ABC's own streaming service, which some prefer for its HD content and others dislike for its rather demanding player.
Hulu has its kinks, but ABC's player blows. Tome its like comparing Mac to PC. Clear winner Hulu!
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|I'm still not sold on Hulu. The only shows I watch are all on CBS, and Hulu only links to them on CBS' own site (which makes it painfully difficult to try and watch a show online).
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|I wouldn't call the Move networks player a "Demanding" player, it has the exact same problem on my Core2Quad 2.4ghz Desktop w/ 3gig of RAM that it does on my Centrino 2ghz laptop with 2gig of RAM. My guess would be that poor programming leads to the incredibly annoying delay when loading content and switching between fullscreen/windowed mode. The problem is only exacerbated by ABC's intrusive ads.
While I don't care for most of ABC's lineup, the ability to watch Scrubs and Castle on the same fantastic website I watch the rest of my shows makes me a happy camper.
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|Hi giwo! But "demanding" struck me as so much more concise than "good grief who programmed this mess and why can't I get fullscreen to work and who thought all these ads were a good idea and why do they hate Linux and and and...?"... :-)
More seriously, I don't like being told that I have to install a special player for just one site. That always rankled me, and then when I installed it and it was so sloppy -- well, my DVR could handle Scrubs and Pushing Daisies. Of course now one's cancelled and the other ends in a week... *sigh*
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|I agree with that entire statement.
Having said that, what I meant to say is I only consider software "demanding" if upgrading the hardware shows (even the slightest) improvement, in this case it doesn't (at least in my own personal tests). Perhaps "shoddy" is a better word. :)
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