An anonymous reader writes "In a mouse and cat game, Hulu the popular online content provider of shows, movies, and more has blocked Boxee yet again from accessing the Hulu content from the Boxee application. Just as Boxee added RSS feeds to include Hulu content, Hulu responded with blocking Boxee users from accessing the content via RSS feeds the very same day. RSS feeds are publicly available and it's really disappointing to hear that a site would block certain applications from accessing their content in such a manner. I would assume that the Boxee development team is currently working on disguising its browser to look like Firefox, Internet Explorer, or some other known browser in an attempt to fool Hulu."
Conventional wisdom tells us that the best conspiracies are completely in the open. People never suspect because they figure a real conspiracy would try to hide itself.
So if the owners of Hulu are in fact aliens, this is exactly the sort of ad campaign they would run.
Hm. Guess we're screwed.
(So let's just hope they're abundantly stupid like the aliens in Signs [wikipedia.org] and never take into account the fact that if water kills you on contact, maybe you shouldn't invade a planet covered in mostly water, inhabited by beings made of mostly water. HTF did that movie ever get past the script stage?)
HTF did that movie ever get past the script stage?
That was the real Shyamalan Twist(tm) of the movie. "I got Mel Gibson and Joaquin Pheonix to star in this steamer, and then I got you to pay me so you could watch it! Surprise!"
Claiming that "Boxee" is like a browser's RSS feed is totally misleading. The software package cuts out the entire site, the adverts, etc and repackages it as almost its own material (with a small source icon).
How would you feel if someone hot-linked your content, consumed your bandwidth, and gave you no advertising revenue in exchange?
It's not an engineer's problem entirely. No matter how they engineer it, someone can possibly scrape their streams, and serve them to the user utilizing the provider's bandwidth.
So they can and shold get their lawyers involved to take action and stop the blatant copyright infringment (framing someone else's content in your own site is a case of infringement, except when you're authorized to do it [implicitly and otherwise], and you do it in the manner so authorized).
There is a possible solution though: inject the ads into the video itself, so they can't be separated.
Make the videos 'dynamic' flash videos, so the advertising can't really be removed without modifying a.SWF file.
Hey, you just described exactly how it works. There is no copyright infringement going on here. Boxee is not a web site, it is a media center application. Hulu allows embedding of their videos. They have ads in the video stream. Boxee basically just embeds the video, ads and all, into the application so that it can be played on your computer screen or TV with a simple interface.
If I recall correctly, Hulu originally provided code to help Boxee display Hulu content. So why the change of heart? I read some speculation somewhere that Hulu is actually being pressured by the content owners to stop Boxee because there is less advertising revenue from web streaming than there is for live TV. Since people use boxee to play videos on their TV and not a computer screen, the content owners feel they are losing out. What I don't think they understand is that you can watch Hulu's videos using your computer on your TV with or without Boxee.
content owners demanded that Boxee stop displaying Hulu content
*shrug*
If they don't want me to watch their content, I have no problem obliging them.
And since Hulu is only available in one country in the world (not the one where I live) I guess there's a lot of their precious content that I won't be watching.
Doesn't bother me, I've managed to survive this long without it.
It's still a retarded move though; hulu and similar services have been drawing people away from "pirated"[sic] content and back to revenue-generating content, and now that it is hitting critical mass the content owners are shooting themselves in the foot. The folks at Hulu seem caught in the middle. Who are the losers? Both consumers and Hulu.
What content producers, software producers, and so forth are STILL failing to realize is that they are making the "pirated"[sic]/counterfeit product MORE valuable than the real thing because the "pirated"[sic] content is invariably not crippled by DRM.
What content producers, software producers, and so forth are STILL failing to realize is that they are making the "pirated"[sic]/counterfeit product MORE valuable than the real thing because the "pirated"[sic] content is invariably not crippled by DRM.
I think they realize what they're doing, and I think they know the consequences. Right now they have content that generates different revenue in different forms. TV is the highest, the internet is lower, and pirated is zero. They were losing some viewers to piracy before, so they countered with Hulu. Now they're losing more viewers from TV to the other two. By limiting Hulu, some portion of the people affected will resort to piracy, but I think they're betting on some portion resorting to plain old TV.
I wouldn't be surprised if the cable/satellite companies and local broadcasters are pressuring the national networks, as they have the most to lose from Internet-streaming set top boxes.
Local broadcasters don't have enormous profit margins. They're hurting right now, [wsj.com] and if ten percent of their market decide to stream Hulu to their TV, it could mean bankruptcy for many smaller providers. NBC and Fox have done the math; they don't want to lose the majority of their audience (who still watch whatever's on the tube) just to make a minority (who've learned about this whiz-bang Internet thingy) happy.
Cable and satellite companies, of course, have tremendous influence over the networks as well, as they provide the majority of the audience these days. They also have a history of doing whatever it takes to prevent competition and sweeten their contracts with the networks. If NBC has to choose between Comcast and Hulu, they'll pick the one that has 25 million paying subscribers. Hint: It's not Hulu...
Honestly, I don't think this is really about Boxee at all. I think it's just an attempt to set precedent. Lots of people are scared to death of a box that lets people watch whatever they want, whenever they want, with no monthly fee (beyond their broadband service). End distributors (local networks, cable companies) are afraid of the competition. Networks are afraid of losing their position as the gatekeepers of content, as the Internet makes it far easier for content creators (the individual production companies) to deal directly with the "distributors" (YouTube, etc).
So the networks have to walk a very fine line here. On the one hand, they can't afford to anger (or bankrupt) their current distributors. On the other, they can't afford to lose their dominance, even as people start switching to Internet-based services.
As a result, the networks seem to be taking a cautious approach: They work to popularize their own online services, like Hulu, in hopes of transferring their content oligopoly to the online world, but they avoid direct competition with their major distribution methods.
I'd wager that if streaming ever reaches a "saturation point", where everybody is watching TV on their computer and the market seems ready to switch, the networks will release some ordained "magic box" which streams their content (and maintains their control over the content market), and happily give their old distributors the metaphoric finger.
Or, if one large content owner makes a big push for streaming set top boxes, expect the rest to follow suit fairly quickly.
Until one of those occurs, though, expect more of the status quo. To use an analogy that describes technology adoption by most large industries: Nobody wants to be the only one in the pool, but they definitely don't want to be the only one out of the pool. They may all decide to jump in together, but if one decides to jump in now, the rest will follow.
Probably like a person with a very broken business model, but that's just me.
Then your solution is what? Hula should shut down completely instead of just excluding Boxee? How does that help anyone?
If you park your car downtown with the windows rolled down and the keys in the ignition, you may be an idiot. But the guy who takes it is still a thief. And the quiet little towns where nobody will take it... those are treasures.
by Anonymous Coward
on Saturday March 07 2009, @09:25PM (#27109317)
YOU CANT STEAL WHAT IS FREELY GIVEN TO YOU.
Why cant you people get that through your heads??
Boxee did nothing but showed the EXACT SAME CONTENT in a better UI. Commercials all were there.
Just because some low IQ moron says something is not to his liking, it does not make it illegal or wrong. Whomever said that Boxee was stealing anything is a complete and utter moron that really needs to be killed so that he does not cause the rest of us to become dumber simply from his existence.
This is the Crux. Hulu said , "no more boxee" because some really really REALLY stupid executive at some content provider that Hulu does nto have the balls to name said they did not like it.
Only the incredibly low IQ people think that boxee was stealing anything. These same people think that Best buy employees are highly educated and know what they are talking about.
If you park your car downtown with the windows rolled down and the keys in the ignition, you may be an idiot. But the guy who takes it is still a thief. And the quiet little towns where nobody will take it... those are treasures.
The problem with your car analogy is that Hulu is explicitly making available their content. If there's no authentication, and they just cough up the data when you ask for it, then you're clearly not stealing - to stretch the analogy a bit more to try to actually make it fit the situation, it's more like the RSS is a flyer telling you where to get the car, and when you get there you're permitted to take it. Of course, this is a stupid analogy and you are a stupid person for trying to make it in the first pl
-I'm not sure what part of hulu you arn't getting. They provide a service but are at the mercy of the content providers. They have no business without them, but they do have one without boxee. So when content providers say "don't let boxee use hulu", hulu listenes, whether they want to or not.
Seeing as hulu lets you embed their content [bustercollings.com] like youtube, it is strange if their objection is that in-site ads are being skipped. (And are we back to the AdBlock extension == theft argument?)
Otherwise, I assume the ads embedded in the video are still be played.
The only reasons I can imagine for Hulu to wat to block Boxee are (1) ignorance of their own profit model (2) planning to release their own hardware box, or else partner with someone else in order to get the same vertical monopoly going.
Boxee does not strip out the ads. It is still the same video stream, boxee just gives a remote-friendly interface to the media. It is no different than watching Hulu in full screen with your computer plugged into a TV. Hulu allows embedding into another website just like Youtube and other media sites, so how is embedding into the Boxee media player any different?
Also, Hulu's ads are played in the video. How are they being deprived of advertising revenue?
You're acting as if the advertisements aren't being displayed -- to my knowledge, the advertisements that are presented (usually 4 to 5 times, from my own viewing of various shows) while watching the video still play.
You're quite welcome to miss the point, if you like. Who am I to stop you if such a thing makes you feel better?
On the other hand... if you'd rather understand what it is I'm actually saying, you should take note of the fact that RSS is meant for content syndication and is meant to be interpreted as a set of individual items, while a web page is meant to be displayed as a whole. Unless Boxee is stripping the RSS content itself, its use is consistent with the purpose of an RSS feed. That's my point.
Now I'm not familiar with Boxee or with Hulu's RSS feed, so I cannot comment on the specifics, but, unless Boxee is actually modifying the contents of the RSS feed, it seems to me that Hulu are acting like jerks.
Well, you might want to look into that. Hulu's RSS just links to the hulu.com page where you can watch and provides a little information about the show (rating, run-time, etc.). Boxee is (presumably) following that link and then page-scraping the video into their own interface. I hear that there are significant performance improvements by using Boxee's player over Hulu's so they may be scraping the video stream directly rather than just embedding the player in a different interface, but in either case th
I see. So rather than a straight presentation of the RSS feed, Boxee is taking the RSS feed and using that to figure out which videos to embed?
I can see how such use of the RSS feed might be seen as questionable, but aren't they still embedding the videos according to Hulu's own embed code? The original poster complained about missing ads, but if Boxee is embedding videos according to Hulu's own standards for third-party embedding then I still can't see much wrong with what they're doing.
Except Boxee didn't strip the commercials from Hulu. I used to watch Hulu in the browser in the beta days, and then later in Boxee. I saw the same ads inlaid in the show whether I watched on the site or via Boxee. The difference was that Boxee had better UI for browsing the programs, and that Boxee's method of reading the stream gave me considerably better framerate/performance than trying to view full-screen in Flash on the site did.
In other words, Boxee was a great deal more usable for me as a viewer, and I saw all the same commercials I did as a user of the website. (Hulu doesn't do sidebar advertising, their adverts are in the programs themselves where ad-breaks would normally be.)
The only advertising that I've noticed is the little banner that appears in the upper right corner, which in my experience is always for the same product shown during the in-video ads.
I guess Hulu's recommended video listings could be considered ads as well, since they're intended to drive you to other Hulu video offerings rather than just watching whatever afterwards, as you would be more likely to do with Boxee.
Interesting theory. Please, let me know when you develop a means to pay the bills with your lofty ideals, it sounds much more fulfilling than selling out the way everyone else does.
Interesting theory. Please, let me know when you develop a means to pay the bills with your lofty ideals, it sounds much more fulfilling than selling out the way everyone else does.
You mean like when my girlfriend releases digital copies under creative commons, allows book publishers, music publishers and event promoters to use her images free with attribution, and then sells the original works of acrylic painted on canvas in higher volume and for higher prices? Works real well... gets a lot of commissioned pieces for murals, does live paintings of performers at raves and spoken word events and festivals, the list goes on.
It's called dealing with the realities of the world. Sell what is naturally scarce and share what is naturally plentiful as wide and far as you can, and people will come knock on your door. Now, contrast that with a business model whose entire existence relies on the continuation of wildly unpopular and wasteful legal structures that treat bits on a wire as though they were carrots dug out of your garden. Who is the idealist here?
You make a grand assumption that most people have some creative contribution to add to this world. Sorry, but most don't. Creative types have a hard time believing this could be true, but it is. Many people have functional contributions that cannot be subsidized by the whims of the internet's paying customers. In fact, it is the case for the vast majority of people. I wish it weren't true, but *that* is the reality of the world, not the one you describe for your talented girlfriend. I wish her well but your scenario doesn't work for the general population.
We're not talking about most people. We're talking about professional creators. If you don't have a creative contribution to add to this world, you sure as hell shouldn't be getting paid to sit around all day publishing.
However, you CAN bypass DRM for the purpose of interoperability. Want to watch media on Boxee? You now fall under the requirements for the clause which allows defeating/bypassing the DRM.
This will result in us just losing the RSS openness of Hulu. Currently, their shows can be embedded in other webpages. They'll probably end up having to remove this too.
You should see the larger image. Boxee is a fork of Xbmc, xbmc but stripped down. Xbmc can run python scripts, check other xbmc plugins which work, ninja video, ted talks, rev3. http://code.google.com/p/voinage-xbmc-plugins/downloads/list [google.com]
I have a plugin for fancast which hosts a lot of the same content as hulu. I'm not sure they intentionally strip out the ads, id be more than willing to sit through them though.
Oh wow, I didn't know about Fancast. It has a lot more of the shows that I usually just download, since hulu doesn't have them.. Why haven't I heard of it before?
This code, executed on a dd-wrt router, will give all your clients 30 seconds of nothing during commercials when watching Hulu videos. It will block most other browser ads also but what the hell... Works really well with Slashdot.
Just add it to your startup section and enjoy a nearly ad-free internet.
---- logger WAN UP Script Executing sleep 5 test -s/tmp/dlhosts if [ $? == 1 ] ; then echo -e "#!/bin/sh\nwget -O - http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt [mvps.org] | grep 127.0.0.1 | tr -d '\015\032' | sed -e '2,\$s/127.0.0.1/0.0.0.0/g' -e 's/[[:space:]]*#.*$//' -e '2,\$s/0.0.0.0 localhost$/127.0.0.1 localhost/g' -e '2,\$s/0.0.0.0 pagead.*.googlesyndication.com//g' | grep 0.0 >/tmp/hosts\nlogger DOWNLOADED http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt [mvps.org]\nkillall -1 dnsmasq" >/tmp/dlhosts chmod 777/tmp/dlhosts/tmp/dlhosts fi ln -s/tmp/hosts/etc/hosts echo "45 23 * * 5 root/tmp/dlhosts" >>/tmp/crontab -----
There is no "ripping" of content. Hulu lets you embed their videos into another website. Their ads are in the video. Boxee just provides an interface to play the video with it streaming from hulu. If you are wondering why you need another interface, realize that Boxee is a Media Center app. It is streamlined to be controlled with a remote and its main function is playing your own content. Adding hulu into the mix gives you the ability to watch hulu's content legally without having to navigate with a normal web browser. The price you pay is you watch the normal Hulu ads. Sounds like free advertising for Hulu to me.
by Anonymous Coward
on Saturday March 07 2009, @07:51PM (#27108689)
My understanding: Content providers gave Hulu a license to display their works on computers. However, they don't perceive Boxee as a computer; instead, they perceive it as a TV. They haven't given Hulu a license to display their works on TVs, so they're unhappy with Hulu being on Boxee. Of course, there's no difference between "display on a computer" and "display on a tv" anymore, but they don't want this to be true. It's dumb, but that's the media industry for you.
When Hulu is ALLOWED to discover the rest of the planet.
Several people have said this, but it needs to be pointed out. Hulu is a corporation with a LEGAL licensing agreement for their content. They have to bow to the whims of the MPAA, etc.
While the ideologues among you will say that they should just tell the media companies to screw themselves, we all know that isn't going to happen.
Both the issue at bar here and the one you present are directly the fault of the content providers. They'll contin
The explanation is simple (Score:5, Funny)
They're aliens.
And that's how they roll.
Actually, they are aliens (Score:4, Insightful)
Conventional wisdom tells us that the best conspiracies are completely in the open. People never suspect because they figure a real conspiracy would try to hide itself.
So if the owners of Hulu are in fact aliens, this is exactly the sort of ad campaign they would run.
Hm. Guess we're screwed.
(So let's just hope they're abundantly stupid like the aliens in Signs [wikipedia.org] and never take into account the fact that if water kills you on contact, maybe you shouldn't invade a planet covered in mostly water, inhabited by beings made of mostly water. HTF did that movie ever get past the script stage?)
Parent
Re:Actually, they are aliens (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
HTF did that movie ever get past the script stage?
That was the real Shyamalan Twist(tm) of the movie. "I got Mel Gibson and Joaquin Pheonix to star in this steamer, and then I got you to pay me so you could watch it! Surprise!"
Boxee is not like RSS in a browser (Score:3, Informative)
Claiming that "Boxee" is like a browser's RSS feed is totally misleading. The software package cuts out the entire site, the adverts, etc and repackages it as almost its own material (with a small source icon).
How would you feel if someone hot-linked your content, consumed your bandwidth, and gave you no advertising revenue in exchange?
Re:Boxee is not like RSS in a browser (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd feel like a damn idiot for momentarily forgetting how the Internet works and for trying to have a lawyer solve an engineer's problem.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not an engineer's problem entirely. No matter how they engineer it, someone can possibly scrape their streams, and serve them to the user utilizing the provider's bandwidth.
So they can and shold get their lawyers involved to take action and stop the blatant copyright infringment (framing someone else's content in your own site is a case of infringement, except when you're authorized to do it [implicitly and otherwise], and you do it in the manner so authorized).
There is a possible solution though
Re:Boxee is not like RSS in a browser (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a possible solution though: inject the ads into the video itself, so they can't be separated. Make the videos 'dynamic' flash videos, so the advertising can't really be removed without modifying a .SWF file.
Hey, you just described exactly how it works. There is no copyright infringement going on here. Boxee is not a web site, it is a media center application. Hulu allows embedding of their videos. They have ads in the video stream. Boxee basically just embeds the video, ads and all, into the application so that it can be played on your computer screen or TV with a simple interface.
If I recall correctly, Hulu originally provided code to help Boxee display Hulu content. So why the change of heart? I read some speculation somewhere that Hulu is actually being pressured by the content owners to stop Boxee because there is less advertising revenue from web streaming than there is for live TV. Since people use boxee to play videos on their TV and not a computer screen, the content owners feel they are losing out. What I don't think they understand is that you can watch Hulu's videos using your computer on your TV with or without Boxee.
Parent
No speculation necessary (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:No speculation necessary (Score:5, Insightful)
content owners demanded that Boxee stop displaying Hulu content
*shrug*
If they don't want me to watch their content, I have no problem obliging them.
And since Hulu is only available in one country in the world (not the one where I live) I guess there's a lot of their precious content that I won't be watching. Doesn't bother me, I've managed to survive this long without it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Your post earns a big "goodie for you".
Re:Boxee is not like RSS in a browser (Score:5, Insightful)
It's still a retarded move though; hulu and similar services have been drawing people away from "pirated"[sic] content and back to revenue-generating content, and now that it is hitting critical mass the content owners are shooting themselves in the foot. The folks at Hulu seem caught in the middle. Who are the losers? Both consumers and Hulu.
What content producers, software producers, and so forth are STILL failing to realize is that they are making the "pirated"[sic]/counterfeit product MORE valuable than the real thing because the "pirated"[sic] content is invariably not crippled by DRM.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What content producers, software producers, and so forth are STILL failing to realize is that they are making the "pirated"[sic]/counterfeit product MORE valuable than the real thing because the "pirated"[sic] content is invariably not crippled by DRM.
I think they realize what they're doing, and I think they know the consequences. Right now they have content that generates different revenue in different forms. TV is the highest, the internet is lower, and pirated is zero. They were losing some viewers to piracy before, so they countered with Hulu. Now they're losing more viewers from TV to the other two. By limiting Hulu, some portion of the people affected will resort to piracy, but I think they're betting on some portion resorting to plain old TV.
How t
Re:Boxee is not like RSS in a browser (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldn't be surprised if the cable/satellite companies and local broadcasters are pressuring the national networks, as they have the most to lose from Internet-streaming set top boxes.
Local broadcasters don't have enormous profit margins. They're hurting right now, [wsj.com] and if ten percent of their market decide to stream Hulu to their TV, it could mean bankruptcy for many smaller providers. NBC and Fox have done the math; they don't want to lose the majority of their audience (who still watch whatever's on the tube) just to make a minority (who've learned about this whiz-bang Internet thingy) happy.
Cable and satellite companies, of course, have tremendous influence over the networks as well, as they provide the majority of the audience these days. They also have a history of doing whatever it takes to prevent competition and sweeten their contracts with the networks. If NBC has to choose between Comcast and Hulu, they'll pick the one that has 25 million paying subscribers. Hint: It's not Hulu...
Honestly, I don't think this is really about Boxee at all. I think it's just an attempt to set precedent. Lots of people are scared to death of a box that lets people watch whatever they want, whenever they want, with no monthly fee (beyond their broadband service). End distributors (local networks, cable companies) are afraid of the competition. Networks are afraid of losing their position as the gatekeepers of content, as the Internet makes it far easier for content creators (the individual production companies) to deal directly with the "distributors" (YouTube, etc).
So the networks have to walk a very fine line here. On the one hand, they can't afford to anger (or bankrupt) their current distributors. On the other, they can't afford to lose their dominance, even as people start switching to Internet-based services.
As a result, the networks seem to be taking a cautious approach: They work to popularize their own online services, like Hulu, in hopes of transferring their content oligopoly to the online world, but they avoid direct competition with their major distribution methods.
I'd wager that if streaming ever reaches a "saturation point", where everybody is watching TV on their computer and the market seems ready to switch, the networks will release some ordained "magic box" which streams their content (and maintains their control over the content market), and happily give their old distributors the metaphoric finger.
Or, if one large content owner makes a big push for streaming set top boxes, expect the rest to follow suit fairly quickly.
Until one of those occurs, though, expect more of the status quo. To use an analogy that describes technology adoption by most large industries: Nobody wants to be the only one in the pool, but they definitely don't want to be the only one out of the pool. They may all decide to jump in together, but if one decides to jump in now, the rest will follow.
Parent
Re:Boxee is not like RSS in a browser (Score:5, Funny)
No matter how they engineer it, someone can possibly scrape their streams
As long as they don't CROSS their streams. That would be bad.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I never had heard about Boxee and this type of thing (I had used Hulu before however) until Hulu/content producers got all crazy.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure this article is about how they are having the engineers solve this "engineer's problem". Yes?
Re:Boxee is not like RSS in a browser (Score:5, Interesting)
"How would you feel if someone hot-linked your content, consumed your bandwidth, and gave you no advertising revenue in exchange?"
Probably like a person with a very broken business model, but that's just me.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably like a person with a very broken business model, but that's just me.
Then your solution is what? Hula should shut down completely instead of just excluding Boxee? How does that help anyone?
If you park your car downtown with the windows rolled down and the keys in the ignition, you may be an idiot. But the guy who takes it is still a thief. And the quiet little towns where nobody will take it... those are treasures.
Re:Boxee is not like RSS in a browser (Score:4, Informative)
Boxee doesn't remove any ads. You see the exact same Hulu ads you would see if you went to their website.
Parent
Re:Boxee is not like RSS in a browser (Score:5, Insightful)
YOU CANT STEAL WHAT IS FREELY GIVEN TO YOU.
Why cant you people get that through your heads??
Boxee did nothing but showed the EXACT SAME CONTENT in a better UI. Commercials all were there.
Just because some low IQ moron says something is not to his liking, it does not make it illegal or wrong. Whomever said that Boxee was stealing anything is a complete and utter moron that really needs to be killed so that he does not cause the rest of us to become dumber simply from his existence.
This is the Crux. Hulu said , "no more boxee" because some really really REALLY stupid executive at some content provider that Hulu does nto have the balls to name said they did not like it.
Only the incredibly low IQ people think that boxee was stealing anything. These same people think that Best buy employees are highly educated and know what they are talking about.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you park your car downtown with the windows rolled down and the keys in the ignition, you may be an idiot. But the guy who takes it is still a thief. And the quiet little towns where nobody will take it... those are treasures.
The problem with your car analogy is that Hulu is explicitly making available their content. If there's no authentication, and they just cough up the data when you ask for it, then you're clearly not stealing - to stretch the analogy a bit more to try to actually make it fit the situation, it's more like the RSS is a flyer telling you where to get the car, and when you get there you're permitted to take it. Of course, this is a stupid analogy and you are a stupid person for trying to make it in the first pl
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
-Did the Parent say that?! no. It is an analogy.
-I'm not sure what part of hulu you arn't getting. They provide a service but are at the mercy of the content providers. They have no business without them, but they do have one without boxee. So when content providers say "don't let boxee use hulu", hulu listenes, whether they want to or not.
Re:Boxee is not like RSS in a browser (Score:5, Insightful)
Seeing as hulu lets you embed their content [bustercollings.com] like youtube, it is strange if their objection is that in-site ads are being skipped. (And are we back to the AdBlock extension == theft argument?)
Otherwise, I assume the ads embedded in the video are still be played.
The only reasons I can imagine for Hulu to wat to block Boxee are (1) ignorance of their own profit model (2) planning to release their own hardware box, or else partner with someone else in order to get the same vertical monopoly going.
Parent
Have you even used Boxee??? (Score:5, Informative)
Boxee does not strip out the ads. It is still the same video stream, boxee just gives a remote-friendly interface to the media. It is no different than watching Hulu in full screen with your computer plugged into a TV. Hulu allows embedding into another website just like Youtube and other media sites, so how is embedding into the Boxee media player any different?
Also, Hulu's ads are played in the video. How are they being deprived of advertising revenue?
Parent
Re:One word. Branding. (Score:4, Insightful)
How do you explain that hulu lets you embed their videos on any web page you choose, just like youtube does?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You're acting as if the advertisements aren't being displayed -- to my knowledge, the advertisements that are presented (usually 4 to 5 times, from my own viewing of various shows) while watching the video still play.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Now I'm not familiar with Boxee or with Hulu's RSS feed
So... you have no idea what you're talking about, but you won't let that stop you?
Re:Boxee is not like RSS in a browser (Score:4, Funny)
It's never stopped anyone else...
Parent
Re:Boxee is not like RSS in a browser (Score:5, Insightful)
You're quite welcome to miss the point, if you like. Who am I to stop you if such a thing makes you feel better?
On the other hand... if you'd rather understand what it is I'm actually saying, you should take note of the fact that RSS is meant for content syndication and is meant to be interpreted as a set of individual items, while a web page is meant to be displayed as a whole. Unless Boxee is stripping the RSS content itself, its use is consistent with the purpose of an RSS feed. That's my point.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Now I'm not familiar with Boxee or with Hulu's RSS feed, so I cannot comment on the specifics, but, unless Boxee is actually modifying the contents of the RSS feed, it seems to me that Hulu are acting like jerks.
Well, you might want to look into that. Hulu's RSS just links to the hulu.com page where you can watch and provides a little information about the show (rating, run-time, etc.). Boxee is (presumably) following that link and then page-scraping the video into their own interface. I hear that there are significant performance improvements by using Boxee's player over Hulu's so they may be scraping the video stream directly rather than just embedding the player in a different interface, but in either case th
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I see. So rather than a straight presentation of the RSS feed, Boxee is taking the RSS feed and using that to figure out which videos to embed?
I can see how such use of the RSS feed might be seen as questionable, but aren't they still embedding the videos according to Hulu's own embed code? The original poster complained about missing ads, but if Boxee is embedding videos according to Hulu's own standards for third-party embedding then I still can't see much wrong with what they're doing.
Re:Boxee is not like RSS in a browser (Score:5, Informative)
Except Boxee didn't strip the commercials from Hulu. I used to watch Hulu in the browser in the beta days, and then later in Boxee. I saw the same ads inlaid in the show whether I watched on the site or via Boxee. The difference was that Boxee had better UI for browsing the programs, and that Boxee's method of reading the stream gave me considerably better framerate/performance than trying to view full-screen in Flash on the site did.
In other words, Boxee was a great deal more usable for me as a viewer, and I saw all the same commercials I did as a user of the website. (Hulu doesn't do sidebar advertising, their adverts are in the programs themselves where ad-breaks would normally be.)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The only advertising that I've noticed is the little banner that appears in the upper right corner, which in my experience is always for the same product shown during the in-video ads.
I guess Hulu's recommended video listings could be considered ads as well, since they're intended to drive you to other Hulu video offerings rather than just watching whatever afterwards, as you would be more likely to do with Boxee.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting theory. Please, let me know when you develop a means to pay the bills with your lofty ideals, it sounds much more fulfilling than selling out the way everyone else does.
Re:Boxee is not like RSS in a browser (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean like when my girlfriend releases digital copies under creative commons, allows book publishers, music publishers and event promoters to use her images free with attribution, and then sells the original works of acrylic painted on canvas in higher volume and for higher prices? Works real well... gets a lot of commissioned pieces for murals, does live paintings of performers at raves and spoken word events and festivals, the list goes on.
It's called dealing with the realities of the world. Sell what is naturally scarce and share what is naturally plentiful as wide and far as you can, and people will come knock on your door. Now, contrast that with a business model whose entire existence relies on the continuation of wildly unpopular and wasteful legal structures that treat bits on a wire as though they were carrots dug out of your garden. Who is the idealist here?
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Re:Boxee is not like RSS in a browser (Score:5, Insightful)
We're not talking about most people. We're talking about professional creators. If you don't have a creative contribution to add to this world, you sure as hell shouldn't be getting paid to sit around all day publishing.
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Re:Boxee is not like RSS in a browser (Score:5, Insightful)
However, you CAN bypass DRM for the purpose of interoperability. Want to watch media on Boxee? You now fall under the requirements for the clause which allows defeating/bypassing the DRM.
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Boxee? (Score:4, Funny)
I blame 4Chan. [encycloped...matica.com]
End result = No more RSS (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:End result = No more RSS (Score:5, Funny)
openness of Hulu
Ah! Is this an oxymoron contest?
My turn then: "Atheism of the Pope"
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Rename slashdot to "Hulu Boxee Wars" (Score:2, Informative)
xbmcboxee (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Screw `em (Score:5, Informative)
This code, executed on a dd-wrt router, will give all your clients 30 seconds of nothing during commercials when watching Hulu videos. It will block most other browser ads also but what the hell... Works really well with Slashdot.
Just add it to your startup section and enjoy a nearly ad-free internet.
---- /tmp/dlhosts /tmp/hosts\nlogger DOWNLOADED http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt [mvps.org]\nkillall -1 dnsmasq" > /tmp/dlhosts /tmp/dlhosts /tmp/dlhosts /tmp/hosts /etc/hosts /tmp/dlhosts" >> /tmp/crontab
logger WAN UP Script Executing
sleep 5
test -s
if [ $? == 1 ] ; then
echo -e "#!/bin/sh\nwget -O - http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt [mvps.org] | grep 127.0.0.1 | tr -d '\015\032' | sed -e '2,\$s/127.0.0.1/0.0.0.0/g' -e 's/[[:space:]]*#.*$//' -e '2,\$s/0.0.0.0 localhost$/127.0.0.1 localhost/g' -e '2,\$s/0.0.0.0 pagead.*.googlesyndication.com//g' | grep 0.0 >
chmod 777
fi
ln -s
echo "45 23 * * 5 root
-----
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I suggest anyone interested in this grab the script form the forums: http://dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=202542#202542 [dd-wrt.com]
(It doesn't add in domain names for links if you have them enabled)
Re:Stop telling companies how to operate. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Stop telling companies how to operate. (Score:5, Funny)
Honestly, I don't know the full history of this story, nor how exactly Hulu works.
This is the point where you should have canceled your post.
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Re:Hulu + Boxee (Score:5, Informative)
My understanding: Content providers gave Hulu a license to display their works on computers. However, they don't perceive Boxee as a computer; instead, they perceive it as a TV. They haven't given Hulu a license to display their works on TVs, so they're unhappy with Hulu being on Boxee. Of course, there's no difference between "display on a computer" and "display on a tv" anymore, but they don't want this to be true. It's dumb, but that's the media industry for you.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
More like..
When Hulu is ALLOWED to discover the rest of the planet.
Several people have said this, but it needs to be pointed out. Hulu is a corporation with a LEGAL licensing agreement for their content. They have to bow to the whims of the MPAA, etc.
While the ideologues among you will say that they should just tell the media companies to screw themselves, we all know that isn't going to happen.
Both the issue at bar here and the one you present are directly the fault of the content providers. They'll contin