Hulu, NBC and Fox's new streaming service, is indeed opening to the public tomorrow as we reported rumors of yesterday. What's news to us is that Hulu will be adding Warner Brothers shows and sports as well. The sports will come as game recaps from the NBA and NHL (finger on the pulse!) as well as full NCAA games. Now, I don't want to be a Debbie downer here, and you can't argue with free, but with the copious advertising, spotty selection of episodes and lack of downloads you've gotta wonder just how much this is going to catch on.
I mean, you can't have it both ways, studios. If you're going to restrict it to streaming and keep people from downloading to watch on their media extenders and portable devices, you can't try to protect your DVD sales by only tossing out a handful of episodes.
Just the other night I tried to watch an episode of Battlestar Galactica on there as I misplaced one of my DVDs and found that there were only a few episodes available, none of which from season 2, which I was looking for. I then poked around and tried to check out SNL and found that they only had four sketches and none of the musical performances from the most recent broadcast. And away to Bittorrent I went.
People can tell the difference between something designed only to tease and promote broadcast TV and DVD sales and something designed to be an actual entertainment destination. If you keep it gimped it's only ever going to be seen as the former, studios. Don't blow it. [Reuters]