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The new Hulu
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- sgdesign 14y agoWow, what a great site. I love the design of their new "our video library can only be streamed within the United States" message. Very readable, good typography, a big improvement over the previous version. This redesign is definitely a success!
- redstripe 14y ago"Sorry, currently our video library can only be watched from within the United States" - same as the old Hulu
- addies 14y agoI wrote a blog post (http://goo.gl/PnaxJ http://goo.gl/PnaxJ) on this a while back along with a work around
- stanleydrew 14y agoThis is not a terribly difficult restriction to get around: 1) Boot an ec2 instance in VA, US 2) ssh -D 8888 <ec2hostname> 3) Configure Chrome/FF to use a SOCKS proxy on localhost:8888
- arunoda 14y agonice.
- arunoda 14y agowhy down voting this? I just said nice.
- jhchabran 14y agoI'm already using a VPN in the US to handle that (Netflix), but they reject my credit card (french one). Any idea of a workaround ? EDIT : typo
- Moto7451 14y agoYou could try purchasing a prepaid Visa, Mastercard, or American Express gift card online and have it shipped to you. I see that amazon.com has various prepaid gift cards. Another option I'd be less excited about is a "reloadable" (i.e. Green Dot) debit card. I believe most US issued reloadable cards require a social security number however.
- mbesto 14y agoI think you can buy a US gift card[1] and use that instead. I haven't tried it, so don't quote me on it ;) [1] - https://www311.americanexpress.com/BOLWeb/bolfeOrder.do?request_type=orderProduct&promotion=ACP&program=ACPWEB&selleracctnbr=6430098999I&intlink=GC:hm:Pg:PGC https://www311.americanexpress.com/BOLWeb/bolfeOrder.do?requ...
- oemera 14y agoI was successful with a prepaid credit card with US dollar as the currency. Just go to entropay.com, create a credit card and put some money on it.
- discountgenius 14y agoAre you willing to wait "6 to 8 weeks?" http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/21/3257144/bitinstant-bitcoin-debit-credit-card-rumor http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/21/3257144/bitinstant-bitcoin...
- recursive 14y agoIf you think that any one of those three steps is not far beyond the technical ability of most hulu users, you're dreaming.
- iconfinder 14y agoAnd probably also beyond a lot of Hacker News readers' technical ability.
- donall 14y agoThis is an interesting comment. I take it for granted that the majority of readers are pretty comfortable doing that kind of thing. Is there any way of telling what the real distribution is?
- recursive 14y agoI doubt it. Maybe a survey. I'm one out of three. I could set up a socks proxy in chrome. As for the others, I'm sure I could learn them, but I have no idea where to start.
- Argorak 14y agoQuoting the old Erlang meme: did you just tell me to go ---- myself? Seriously. I won't jump through hoops to give others my money, broken copyright or not. I don't see a huge push by those companies to change the way things are. Wheres the lobbying for a global copyright or easier access rules? Where are the visible changes? As long as all those efforts don't lead to a change, they won't have my business.
- DiabloD3 14y agoYes, Bob, I think he did.
- stanleydrew 14y agoI don't think you should pay them. I certainly don't. I was merely pointing out how I've been able to watch Hulu content while traveling outside the US.
- Argorak 14y agoI am not able to use Hulu (wrong country), but don't they at least have a travel mode? Spotify has one, for example.
- snowwrestler 14y agoHow would you be giving Hulu any of your money when the shows are free to watch?
- Argorak 14y agohttp://www.hulu.com/plus http://www.hulu.com/plus
- snowwrestler 14y agoI know about Hulu Plus, but the subject of this particular discussion is their (free) website redesign.
- mistercow 14y agoYou know what's even easier than that? BitTorrent.
- jwr 14y agoHave you actually tried? Can you pay for Hulu with a non-US credit card?
- jeffool 14y agoSadly, that's not Hulu, that's the rights holders. And that's not changing for a long time.
- dusing 14y agoEvery conversation about Hulu gets highjacked by this kind of talk. We get it, its not changing anytime soon, and its not even Hulu's fault. Now back to the topic at hand...
- jwr 14y agoWell of course it does. Hulu does not want to sell to the majority of the world population, that's a pretty significant issue. Also, it's irrelevant whether it's Hulu's fault or not. It needs to be brought up regularly, to put pressure on everyone (including Hulu). If we ignore the issue, we accept the status quo. Look at it another way: for a large number of HN readers this news item is just an annoyance. Something we can't even check out. You see a news item, you click on the link and get a "nyah nyah nothing for you here, just go away". I'd say that merits a mention in the comments.
- lukifer 14y agoThey could at least make the effort, even if the library available to each country starts out small.
- officemonkey 14y ago>its not changing anytime soon, and its not even Hulu's fault. Of course it's Hulu's fault. Hulu's owned by NBC, FOX, and Disney. I am certain those three content providers could retain world-wide internet streaming rights for their shows and make them available in any number of countries. As long as they make it impossible for the rest of the 6.4 billion people to watch their site, they're not only leaving money on the table, but they're encouraging people to pirate.
- house9-2 14y agoCheckout http://www.unblock-us.com/ http://www.unblock-us.com/ to get around this, i was able to watch olympics on bbc which was great
- necenzurat 14y agomeh... you can try thepiratebay.se
- azylman 14y agoThe videos still don't fill the whole screen when not maximized like Netflix. :( Also, HuluWithMe doesn't work in it. Other than that, I like it a lot.
- droithomme 14y agoIt used to be pretty nice to navigate, you go to the show page and there's a list of the episodes they have available and their air dates, along with another list of clips and webisodes. You also have recommended related shows, information about when new episodes are released. Hovering over any title shows a brief description of the episode. Then on each individual episode page, discussion about the show. Within the viewers, heat graph timelines available showing what parts people watched the most. All this is gone. Instead, animated episode titles in a slide show. Can't find a list of episodes available, seems to not exist except by playing catch-the-moving-tile, a frustrating game with little pay off. Discussions are now in a comments section which seems to be empty on most pages. Pages are slow to load. No doubt the UI experts that created this monstrosity are the best and the brightest, from the latest schools with the most contemporary techniques. They always are.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- droithomme 14y agoNo bitterness, but intense frustration when usability takes a hit. Based on experience, the bigger preview images and the gee whiz animation will be found to be appreciated among test subjects and the redesign thus proclaimed a success. But the new difficulties in finding shows to watch, and to comment on and thus engage with, will result in fewer views as time goes by. Animated transitions, slow alpha fade ins for menus and popovers, and huge fonts are the latest design fad and is a must have for 2012 sites. If it makes actual usability worse, it doesn't matter. This evening I went there, saw a clip for The Office. This caused be to wonder if it had started or was about to start, so I went to the show page. No longer are there air dates shown. The clip I saw that was featured it wasn't clear if it was a preview from the next season or something from the past (I didn't remember seeing it). Went to find the episode list and found it doesn't exist anymore. Went to find discussion to see if others were talking about when the shows start and comments were empty. Couldn't accomplish anything I wanted to. I'm going to say that's a usability failure, at least compared to last year's design. There's a lot of room for improvement on Hulu so a redesign is not unwelcome. It's always been challenging to find what recently broadcast TV shows are available, one has to click on multiple next/prev tabs on multiple layers of sliding shows. But rather than add a list that shows a lot in a compact space, they removed the list from other areas and copied the difficult parts of their site onto the parts that were actually working. Not all the changes in the last few months are bad. The hover text on the play controls are nice, explaining that clicking the volume icon does mute, and that the round arrow means 10 second rewind. But overall the new design has many things that are a step backward.
- james4k 14y agoUnfortunately, there are still an annoying number of ads, which is the main reason I got rid of my Plus subscription. Can anyone comment on whether or not things have improved for subscribers? Edit: Come to think of it, it was more the fact that so many ads repeated, rather than the number or length of them.
- rdl 14y agoI rarely use the website to watch Hulu, and really don't get much value out of Hulu Plus on console. I wish they'd put effort into licensing worthwhile content vs. (Also, Amazon Prime streaming is usually HORRIBLE video quality for me, as well as selection. Netflix is really the only non-pirated service with decent selection and quality, and even it really lacks for selection compared to 2y ago. But I don't want to pay $20/movie for iTunes movies.)
- sil3ntmac 14y agoAmazon Instant Video is great though... except that you must use a browser to purchase videos. You can then access them in your "Instant Video Library" on console.
- rdl 14y agoMaybe I should buy an instant video to compare quality -- I was assuming they'd be as bad as the amazon prime instant videos.
- rdl 14y agoQuality still horrible, even on paid content. I have a 1080p projector fed from a ps3, xbox, appletv, and for each, I get what looks like SD, and overcompressed at that. Yellowstone (HD) on a Mac (in Chrome) also appears SD-quality. I'm on 100M comcast business, and everything else works fine, with Amazon reporting it's in HD mode with good performance, so I think it's just crap encoding :(
- nivla 14y agoI agree, Amazon Instant Video (free with Prime) is wonderful. The best bang for money, two birds one stone, but one thing I have noticed is that they hardly get new contents and yet they still expire the old ones. Its been 4 months and the "Recently Added" section remains untouched for both movies and shows.
- bradgessler 14y ago... aaand it still uses flash.
- jakejake 14y agoI am anxious to give Hulu my money, however the paid "plus" membership has way too many ads. I understand they have their business plan numbers worked out, but the payed membership shouldn't have the same number of ads as the free version.
- dangrossman 14y agoThere's a wildly successful and profitable business model for getting money for TV content. It's cable and satellite subscriptions. More than half of all households in the US pay for a cable subscription. Everyone (in the US) gets TV content from the major networks for free -- just connect an antenna to your TV. You can pay to get more content, and access to previous seasons, by subscribing to cable or satellite. Subscribing doesn't reduce the ads at all, just gets you more things to watch. Hulu is an exact replica of the business model, except using the web instead of radio and cable lines, as the delivery method. Everyone (in the US) gets TV content from Hulu for free -- just browse to their website. You can pay to get more content, and access to previous seasons, by subscribing to Hulu Plus. Subscribing to Hulu Plus doesn't reduce the ads at all, just gets you more things to watch. The only difference is that a cable subscription averages more than 10 times the monthly cost of Hulu Plus. To expect to not only pay 90% less than cable, but also eliminate the advertising, is unrealistic.
- jakejake 14y agoNetflix seems to be able to do it.
- dangrossman 14y agoThey're not. Netflix doesn't carry any currently airing season of network or premium television. Netflix is the new Blockbuster, Hulu is the new cable company. Both of those consumer models have to exist for the content production funding model to continue working the way it works. Netflix isn't going to produce a full prime time lineup of shows every year on $8 per subscriber. Not at the costs networks currently pay for production ($1.5-2 million per episode generally... with hit shows up to $10-15 million per episode). Either the ads stay, or they figure out a way to produce shows of the same quality for much less money. To give some perspective, more than $60 billion is spent on TV advertising per year in just the US. So if everyone were to just sell subscriptions at Netflix's price, in exchange for new television without ads, they would need to get... every person in the United States (including all the babies) to subscribe. Twice, per person. Just to make up for the ad revenue, ignoring all the lost revenue of people dropping cable subscriptions. Otherwise, the money that currently funds producing these shows just won't exist, so there won't be anything for them to sell you. There is no future with everyone on an ad-free Netflix for new TV with content that costs as much to produce as today's network television.
- jeffool 14y agoTaking a few minutes, looking around, it's fine. In fact, I dig it. But was design ever the problem for Hulu? Content is king here, and Hulu just doesn't have it. As a viewer, I expect a site like this has to either be niche, or truly all encompassing. I think things like Stargate or Highlander could support their own sites. Comedy Central was smart to do their stuff (South Park, Daily Show, Colbert) by show. CBS even does Star Trek on StarTrek.com. Hulu seems to try to do everything, but fails. I genuinely think they could do better if they spun off niche sites, crediting them all as "Brought to you by Hulu".
- onedev 14y agoOne thing I noticed is that the content doesn't fit the screen as well as it used to. The graphics are all really big and takes a bit of scrolling to explore the frontpage, which I don't think is an optimal design choice. However, its a great redesign overall. Reminds me a bit of Netflix.
- Fando 14y agoNot available in Canada :(
- iceron 14y agoOne of the more interesting things about this new version is its "face match" feature. It allows you to highlight over an actors face and it gives you card of information about them. http://new.hulu.com/labs/tagging http://new.hulu.com/labs/tagging
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- shuri 14y agoVery nice. Some thoughts. The old slideshow was amazingly annoying. You click, it slides by slowly but doesn't reveal the text. You wait some more until the text slowly fades in...nope not interesting. You click again. I would still make the text fade in faster. The new layout looks very nice. I would make the hover details appear faster as well, only a sliver of time after the play button appears. The title in the hover-details should be more obviously clickable. Personally, I really don't like having to blindly mouse around until I stumble upon something clickable (even though it seems like the trendy thing to do).