Hulu.com lauches

So, after an extended private beta Hulu.com launches publicly today with tv shows from Bravo, Fuel TV, FX, Sci Fi, Style, Sundance, and Oxygen.

More: Digg discussions, Wikipedia

Since I just posted about the advantages of peer based media distribution I find Hulu worth noting. It will be an interesting test of a centralized distribution for popular mainstream TV shows. Despite the fact that it's a huge improvement over past IPTV services it displays many of the shortcomings I speak of in previous posts. Some of these issues include:

1) Now that it's out of a limited private beta can it scale to meet demanad?

2) There is no subscription mechanism (i.e. RSS) or standardized interface (i.e. Miro) for subscribing to Hulu content as well as content from other distributors. In the long term can we really expect people to go around and visit 8 or 18 different websites in the future to catch up on their favorite weekly TV shows?

3) The Hulu interface is not conducive to important social aspects of the web that would encourage it's use... i.e. linking to shows, embedding shows in a web page, or even linking to a particular segment of a show for reference in discussion. These social aspects are the life blood of all websites, particularly where video is concerned (i.e. youtube) since more truditional search mechanisms don't work well on non-textual content such as video.

4) While a huge improvement over previous mainstream media attempts to bring tv shows to the web the general UI is still very cumberome by traditional TV standards. There is to much clicking, to many destractions, it has a non-standardized UI and has overly intrusive / even obnoxious advertising.

5) Hulu is not available worldwide. It is only available in the US. Meanwhile the market is increasingly global.

While I expect Hulu to have some degree of success until many of these aspects improve I would not expect to see a downturn in the peer based black/grey markets for mainstream media.

RSS + Bittorrent distribution for TV and online video

The Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) has made their most popular TV series available DRM-free via BitTorrent, even better it's available as a subscribe-able RSS feed via software like Miro. Shown here is the subscribe-able feed in Miro the popular open source video aggregater.

I just wish the show was available in English. :)



Entire and partial news programs like CNN, ABC and CBS nightly news are already widely available via subscribe-able RSS feed (podcast), and the Daily Show, Colbert Report and other highly popular TV shows have been widely distributed unofficially via similar means on TVRSS.net, but this may be the first TV show to officially embrace this technology pioneered by video bloggers.

I expect that this form of distribution (RSS + Bittorrent) will become increasingly popular with TV producers as they realize it does not threaten their traditional advertising supported models.

To start with I expect PBS, BBC or other distributors less threatened by peer based distribution (P2P) culture to officially embrace the RSS + bittorrent distribution model.

NPR has already widely embraced RSS distribution (aka. podcasting) for audio programing with over 500 subscribe-able channels for their radio shows, and PBS has a dozen or so subscribe-able video podcasts though they are currently just partial shows or show clips. I expect timely news programs such as Frontline will be the first to officially embrace the RSS + bittorrent distribution model as bittorrent scales much better for popular, timely, high definition content, much like the Daily Show and Colbert Report.

RSS + bittorrent distribution is a counter point to new proprietary distribution services from content creators like Hulu.com (currently only available via private beta) and NBC.com and which are only currently available by visiting and watching programing on website, have no subscription mechanisms, and are not available beyond desktop computers.... i.e. on your TV or hand held device.

There are also alternative systems like Joost and Veoh but while these proprietary 3rd part networks have a high degree of usability and interface polish as is typical of proprietary solutions they lack the flexibility to scale to handle the wide variety of newly available content on the web and the various cellular, hand held and set top box platforms.

Of course there are also solutions from Apple, and Tivo for television producers, but these are increasingly complimentary to RSS / Podcasting and perhaps in the future even added bittorent distribution.

What makes RSS + bittorrent such a powerful combination is it's increasingly openly accessible to virtually anyone who wishes to distribute media online via various services, and RSS / podcasting is already starting to be adopted by set top box, cellular, and handheld manufacturers like Apple (AppleTV, iPod & iPhone), Tivo, Nokia, Akimbo and many others.

Bittorrent is the final piece of the puzzle allowing extremely rapid scaling for the distribution of high definition content but it may take much longer to popularize do the greater technical requirements in implementation on various hardware platforms.

Major new Mefeedia release this week

There's a major new release of mefeedia out today. Lots of bug fixes, usability enhancements, and all around improvements like mefeedia playlists and guides!

One of my favorite new toys is the "What I'm watching" widget. It shows all the latest videos from your favorite vloggers and provides great link love to their blogs. It's the sweetest blogroll widget around.

You'll see mine on the right hand sidebar of my video blog at mmeiser.com/blog and on the left hand sidebar of my mefeedia channel. You can create yours by subscribing to you favorite video blogs and podcasts on mefeedia and copying the code from your own mefeedia channel and pasting it into your own blog or web page. Let us know what you think! We're always looking for ideas for making mefeedia better.

I'm really exited about mefeedia's renewed direction and vitality. This is just the start of some great things to come. A special thanks to Frank Sinton the new owner and Devlon who's been helping make Mefeedia great for almost two years now. Great job Frank and Devlon!

Below are the details Frank posted to the mefeedia mailing list. Be sure to join up and tell us what you'd like to see.

We are very happy today - a new version of Mefeedia has been released! :-) Lots of improvements, bug fixes, and a nicer user interface. This was the work of a lot of people, mainly ideas from videobloggers and brainstorming sessions within the Mefeedia team.

Three main areas of focus for this release were:

Reliability / Bug Fixes - this was our#1 focus. Mefeedia has been very strong on creating great tools for videobloggers. We want to make those even better - not by adding more bells and whistles, but instead by making sure the current features work GREAT. Here is a list of some of the fixes (not comprehensive, but a good sampling):

• RSS - tons of fixes to account for special characters and others special cases. Your Queue, Guides, Favs, Tags, and other RSS feeds coming out of Mefeedia are now working very reliably. :)
• When adding a video to a playlist, the playlist uses the thumb from the playlist post.
• Each folder in a Playlist can now be exported via RSS and JSON formats directly from the playlist start/"Home" page.
• "Add to Queue" from a Playlist is working again.
• Adding individual videos to your Queue is woking again! This broke back when the new database schema was implemented. It is fixed now - add any video on Mefeedia.com to your queue now without having to subscribe to the entire feed.
• Your feed page - removed a number of broken links and overall, a bunch of clean-up.

Usability / UI Update - really, making it easier for users to use Mefeedia!

• Home page - "latest/last 24 hours" theme
• Header change
• Navigation change (Guides and Playlists now get prominent placement in the nav).
• Sign-up on home page is now only shown on clicking the "yea baby."
• Full registration validation (with AJAX unique username and email lookup)
• Visibility and Rollover effect (rollover effect only on Firefox for now) when cruising through entries (favs, feeds page, etc.)
• Centering of "Entry" / Watch your video page - just nicer in general.
• Site-wide style sheet changes (non-underlined, nice blue for non-visited links, grey underlined for visited links, among others).

New Features

• "What I'm Watching" widget - put your Queue on your website or blog. :) Mine is on this blog in the right sidebar. To use your "What I'm Watching" widget, just login and click on the "My Channel" navigation link, and copy and paste the code from the left column textarea box. Looking for inputs on this… lots of cool widgets are possible with the use of great thumbs, so let us know what you would like to see with this widget and other possible widgets (maybe a "Who's vlogging" widget?).
• "Latest from [feed name here]" widget - see an example here: http://www.mefeedia.com/feed_promote.php?id=6988 - lots of linky love. All thumbs link directly to your vlog post!
• Videos, feeds, and websites count on the home page.
• Latest Tags (24 hours) on Home Page and Tags page

So, check out Mefeedia and let us know what you think! Enjoy. As always, use this forum to post suggestions, ideas, issues, and thoughts. :)
http://www.mefeedia.com

Thanks,
-Frank