Hulu

[Duper]

Dunno how many of you know aobut Hulu, but it's a free site where you can watch a lot of shows. Among which are Firefly, Babylon 5 and the HD versions of Str Trek!

..ok, my geek is showing.

Fringe is on there too; a new, pretty cool series. A kinda a cross between CSI and X-files.

oh. linky: HULU!

[Sapphire Wolf]

..ok, my geek is showing.

face the fact:
most of us are geeks and/or nerds (including me!)

(I finally reached 1000 posts! Stupid teen-hood )

[Octopus]

On my hulu account I subscribe to Sanctuary, Heroes, Monk, ReGenesis*, House*, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Fringe, and American Dad!.

*Most favorite.

[Aus-RED-5]

Sorry, currently our video library can only be streamed from within the United States

Sucks if you are like me who lives outside the US.

[Krom]

face the fact:
most of us are geeks and/or nerds (including me!)

(I finally reached 1000 posts! Stupid teen-hood )

You have a long road ahead of you young padawan.

[Sedwick]

Yeah, I rewatched some Superbowl ads there. My favorite was the CareerBuilder.com \"Tips\" spot!

[Duper]

face the fact:
most of us are geeks and/or nerds (including me!)

(I finally reached 1000 posts! Stupid teen-hood )

You have a long road ahead of you young padawan.

yup, even I have a ways to go to touch greatness as such as grand poobah Krom.

Red-5, that Does suck. sorry you can't get that. E-mail them and see if they have plans to host in your hemi. They market most of those shows to you folks so I don't see why it wouldn't do well.

[Gekko71]

face the fact:
most of us are geeks and/or nerds (including me!)

(I finally reached 1000 posts! Stupid teen-hood )

You have a long road ahead of you young padawan.

yup, even I have a ways to go to touch greatness as such as grand poobah Krom.

Red-5, that Does suck. sorry you can't get that. E-mail them and see if they have plans to host in your hemi. They market most of those shows to you folks so I don't see why it wouldn't do well.

That's pretty unlikely sorry Duper. Content licensing agreements with various suppliers (DVD distributors, FTA networks, Cable / Satellite networks, major retailers etc) throughout the globe will prevent much of that content ever being released (online) to audiences outside the US. The major studios know they would get their arses sued if they did.

Still - give the situation enough time and that may change (Australia in particular will have to increase its broadband infrastructure first though Red - so don't hold your breath).

[Duper]

yeah, I understand your version of our FCC has pretty much put it's foot down on how much bandwidth will be allowed? like 3 megs down, tops or some such?

[Spooky]

░

[Gekko71]

yeah, I understand your version of our FCC has pretty much put it's foot down on how much bandwidth will be allowed? like 3 megs down, tops or some such?

Not quite Duper (although that is a factor) - it's more a matter of economics and geography.

Australia is roughly the same size as the continental US - yet has only 21 million people living on it. There are more people living within the New York / New Jersey city limits than living on the entire Australian land mass.

My home state of WA for example is over 1,000,000 square kilometers in size (about one third of Australia's total surface area), but has just over 2 million residents, most of those live in our capital city of Perth. You can literally travel for 1,000 miles in any direction from Perth and not come to another city of similar size.

When you have such small populations of people living such vast distances apart, laying down a comprehensive cable / broadband network is an expensive exercise. Plus, the Australian Government is tied to a policy of providing better ITC services in the outback / rural parts of Australia ...but currently they have no idea how to do it - and are caught between a rock and a hard place with the industry heavyweights every time they try to resolve these telecommunications problems. (a perfect example - all FTA stations in Australia currently have to broadcast in SD analogue, 720 Digital and 1080 digital simultaneously, because the government couldn't decide on one broadcast standard ...what a balls up!! )

Anyway, as a result of all this, our broadband capacity is nowhere near what the rest of the developed world has, and utill we lift our game on cable infrastructure (or better yet: make mobile/cellular bandwidth more affordable), there won't be enough demand for streaming intermet TV / Video on demand services to be commercially viable on a large scale in this country.

[Sirius]

Just for reference, Hulu won't even work for me and I'm just across the Canadian border - but if I travelled an hour or two south to the Seattle area it'd be fine!

Politics, huh?

There are more content providers that do work in Canada than in places like Australia/New Zealand though. You pretty much just have to hit BitTorrent there. (Hm, is this \"zoning\" intended to protect copyright, by any chance?)

P.S. Gekko - you should note Australia has a bunch of people clustered in moderately large cities as well. While it's a huge country and on average has a pretty low population density, the places you actually have to service aren't so bad. The outback is next thing to uninhabited anyway, so not providing terrestrial service there isn't going to be a problem.

[Gekko71]

Just for reference, Hulu won't even work for me and I'm just across the Canadian border - but if I travelled an hour or two south to the Seattle area it'd be fine!

Politics, huh?

There are more content providers that do work in Canada than in places like Australia/New Zealand though. You pretty much just have to hit BitTorrent there. (Hm, is this "zoning" intended to protect copyright, by any chance?)

P.S. Gekko - you should note Australia has a bunch of people clustered in moderately large cities as well. While it's a huge country and on average has a pretty low population density, the places you actually have to service aren't so bad. The outback is next thing to uninhabited anyway, so not providing terrestrial service there isn't going to be a problem.

You're right about the cities part Sirius. Australia has the most urbanised population in the world (approx 95%) and service in the cities is reasonable to good. The part about the outback being largely uninhabited is also true.

But Australia is not just separated into the cities and the Outback. Semi- rural / rural areas with varying population densities exist in the coastal areas between the larger cities and further inland. These areas typically have shocking broadband connections (256kps and lower). And while there are population clusters throughout these areas, the distances between these clusters is still considerable, hence your still looking at miles of cable between these places and/or repeater stations for GSM / 3G bandwidth. The profits telecoms make in the cities partially support the increased costs of servicing rural areas.

Also keep in mind there are relatively few underwater cables between Aust. and overseas networks - so there's another bottleneck right there.

And yes, the 'zoning' exists precisely to protect not just copyright, but also the multiple revenue streams from international content licensing agreements in other countries. There is a significant price premium on DVDs in Australia for example compared to the US. These premiums aren't totally justified by increased costs - in many cases it's mostly just profit.

[Sirius]

It is hard to get decent broadband out to rural communities, yes, but don't they have that problem in the US too? I'm not entirely familiar with the situation there.

There are a handful of video-on-demand services that should work in Australia, but the bigger ones (Hulu for instance) ... well yeah.

[SilverFJ]

Hulu is a bunch of aliens. Didn't you watch the super bowl?

[Duper]

that's on Hulu too!




I guess they don't care!

[VonVulcan]

Hulu is pretty cool, but no where near as cool as Netflix streaming movies/tv with no commercials. Not free but nearly. ($8.99 a month) will get you unlimited, commercial free viewing with a Netflix capable device (Some titles in HD no less). Including unlimited 1-at-a-time disks.

No, I don't work for Netflix.