Its a shame that this will almost certainly be shut down quickly. Just browsed Hulu and they have shows on there which I download on a weekly basis.
I do not watch much TV. I do not want to pay an extra £20/mo to get the hundred or so channels I need to watch the handful of shows I enjoy.
Instead to get access to shows I like reasonably quickly I need to frequent some ad-infested torrent crap hole to find the file. The alternative is wait for it to come on DVD which can be up to or beyond 9 months after the show has finished airing in the states.
I would happily pay for hulu. I would happily buy advanced access for individual series. Maybe this advanced access fee could then become a voucher to own the series? Promote a purchase after the series has finished?
Unfortunately due to geography this isn't allowed... so I will keep downloading torrents and keep giving ad revenue to some unscrupulous torrent site owner. Not because I am bad person. Its because the entertainment industry hasn't figured out a way to give me an option to access their content.
Note: I subscribe to Netflix - which is great if you don't want up-to-date episodes of TV shows. Why I can't buy credits to watch the latest season or two is beyond me.
It's not that they haven't figured it out, it's that Hulu's average revenue per user earns much less than DVD sales or TV sales.
Hulu, Netflix, etc. all WANT licenses in perpetuity worldwide. It's not they don't want to offer it everywhere, it's that the licensors won't let them.
Profits for online media need to be higher to kill broadcast. The average user watches 6 episodes on Hulu per month and earns $2 for that month. Buying a 12-episode season for $30 means that a DVD buyer is 750% as profitable as a Hulu watcher. Hulu has about 30 million users, but in terms of TV profitability, you can wave your hands a little bit and equate the importance of that audience to 4 million TV watchers.
Similarly, Dish Network has 14 million subscribers, a much lower number than Hulu or Netflix, yet has far greater profit and therefore much greater purchasing power for content licenses.
It's a bitter pill to swallow, but Hulu and Netflix are such a great value that they're not providing enough of one to be the destination for the newest, best content. Which is why they're working on creating original content - hoping that, among other things, it increases eyeballs, which increases ad sale profits, which makes it more profitable to the entrenched content producers - which, finally, is their path to dominating the online entertainment market.
I think their strategy is wrong and that there's a better path.
I get what you are saying. I get that on Netflix for example they aren't just going to give away the latest series or episodes away for "free" to a standard account. I am fine with this. What I want though is an option where I can pay to watch the shows I enjoy. I feel it is so dumb that I need to request this.
If Netflix offered credits. £1 to unlock latest episodes I would pay that. I will probably purchase the DVD anyway. Why not? It would be really convenient. This shouldn't interfere to much with traditional TV channels. If you already have the relevant cable package you wouldn't be paying for the episodes again. You would just watch it on the cable channel or catch up or whatever.
Its the startling lack of consumption options which is empowering piracy. Right now I am downloading a US TV episode of a show I follow. The TV package to get this channel in my country costs £26.50 a month. Considering how little actual TV I watch it would be literally £7 per episode assuming the show is shown every week. I am buying the show's dvd box set when it comes out. I want to support the show. I want to see the extras. I would be paying episode by episode now if there was an option... alas... licensing prevents that. I find it so frustrating. Lobbiests in the UK are already pressuring Google to delist or devalue links to copyright infringed content. I just wish a little of this gusto was put into creating new ways to legally access copyrighted content.
I see what you're saying and I think I agree with what you're getting at but to do so Netflix would need to build a radically different service and license it differently as well.
I would go further than that, and say I would happily pay £40 or so a month for unfettered access to tv, music, games, etc.
They could take my money and divide it between the content creators based on the content that I had consumed.
Let's get away from silo'd mentatlities reinforcing old-world ownership models, and make content easy-enough to consume without having to revert to piracy.
Apple was able to do this for music with iTunes, and now the video content owners are terrified of giving any one platform too much access and losing control of the market. By keeping the market fragmented they have more leverage over the platforms (Apple, Amazon, Netflix), and it they hope to gain more control (and money) over the long term.
In the short term I think this actually hurts both the platform owners and the content providers because it's so much easier to download the content illegitimately right now.
Yeah, lots of VPN services let you do this. However, it becomes hard to do at scale because some of the services like Netflix, Hulu, etc. work to actively block IP addresses that represent anonymous proxies/VPNs[1]. For example, I was unable to use my WiTopia account to use Hulu.jp. Instead, I had to register for a separate VPN account on StrongVPN. Even then, one of their Tokyo-based tunnel end points worked, and the other didn't. That's because Hulu works actively to detect these servers and blocks access to them.[2]
I imagine this will be even harder to scale since the only thing people will be using the VPN's outward facing IP for is connecting to these services, as opposed to the mixed usage traffic the other VPN providers see.
This only seems to set a proxy which is ok, but limited to your browser. Stand-alone mediaplayers (apple tv, roku, ...) won't be able to use this easily.
I always liked the DNS based services[0] seeing as you can enter them in your DSL router and all wifi appliances will be able to take advantage of them.
The other option I used was using socks and proxychains[1] to force e.g. XBMC through an SSH connection to a cheap US VPS.
Both of them have the advantage that you don't push ALL of your traffic over a VPN line.
For those who want to explore the DNS based services there are a few options. These services seem to very similar and most of them are $5 a month.
I have been using http://playmo.tv for just over a year and I get my daily dose of Netflix, Hulu through my Apple TV.
Prior to discovering "geounblocking" I must admit how oblivous I was about the advances in streaming media :s I am happy to pay for the conveniences of streaming Netflix, etc.
It's also worth noting that those services have to "manually" enable support for sites. Playmo e.g. doesn't seem to support any of the BBC/iPlayer content. Unblock US does (and a few more). The only downside is that the Playmo website looks way more snazzy :)
Are the users of this service technically performing illegal activity? After all, the reason we're not watching Hulu is because it's licensed only for certain areas. I don't know the law pertaining to this case itself.
EDIT: Obviously using a VPN isn't illegal (in most first world countries, anyway), but the actual access of Hulu from an unlicensed area is what I mean.
Unless they constantly change their proxy's IP and play cat and mouse with the targeted websites. That is possible without user intervention because they use a self-hosted file (http://mediahint.com/default.pac) to setup the proxy through the use of their extension.
I do not watch much TV. I do not want to pay an extra £20/mo to get the hundred or so channels I need to watch the handful of shows I enjoy.
Instead to get access to shows I like reasonably quickly I need to frequent some ad-infested torrent crap hole to find the file. The alternative is wait for it to come on DVD which can be up to or beyond 9 months after the show has finished airing in the states.
I would happily pay for hulu. I would happily buy advanced access for individual series. Maybe this advanced access fee could then become a voucher to own the series? Promote a purchase after the series has finished?
Unfortunately due to geography this isn't allowed... so I will keep downloading torrents and keep giving ad revenue to some unscrupulous torrent site owner. Not because I am bad person. Its because the entertainment industry hasn't figured out a way to give me an option to access their content.
Note: I subscribe to Netflix - which is great if you don't want up-to-date episodes of TV shows. Why I can't buy credits to watch the latest season or two is beyond me.