Hulu Labs cooks up Desktop player
Hulu has lifted the curtain on its beta-driven Labs section — and more importantly its new desktop application for home computers.
The Hulu Desktop, billed as “a lean-back viewing experience,” works with robust Macs and PCs (view system requirements). The app is downloaded from the Hulu site. Beyond that no browser is needed. You’ll need a current version of Flash for the thing to work.
The Desktop will feel familiar to fans of Boxee, the open-source media center app that Hulu unplugged from its video stream months ago. Unfortunately, the Hulu Desktop starts playing a video upon launch, a feature that’s drawing complaints from beta testers.
The Desktop takes commands from remotes for the Windows Media Center and Apple devices (as well as keyboards and your mouse). Linking the computer and your TV monitor would bring Hulu to your living room, of course.
Although you don’t need a Hulu account to use the Desktop, it looks like a good thing to link up for those who want access to their queue, histories and playback preferences. “Friends” aren’t welcome, so far.
The beta is very much for real. A lot of people are looking for bugs in the Hulu Desktop, and finding them. There seems to be a pattern of crashing after a few minutes of playing. Interesting comments in the thread.
Other products on the Hulu Labs page include a Video Panel Designer, which produces embeddable widgets. Webmasters can select a design from a fairly robust panel, with six color schemes. The width and size are customizable as well. There are various options such as full-length programs or clips.
Some shows and movies are only available as clips. Hulu says that “generally speaking” all of its content is available via the desktop client, but gives itself an out due to content providers’ wishes. There are ads on the videos (”limited commercial interruption”).
There are persistent reports that Hulu’s iPhone app is on the horizon, but this Flash-dependent client is of no apparent help. (It’s conceivable that the Hulu-iPhone app could be revealed at the Apple Developer Conference next week.)
The Labs page also has tryout versions of a recommendation system and a modest page for “time-based browsing” that allows users to search by date. The recommendation-feature preview, oddly, requires a login to view.
Macworld has a good overview and basic review of the Hulu Desktop.
You may recall that CBS Labs launched a similar page last year, but it hasn’t provided much beyond the preview of the CBS HD player.
System requirements for Mac include “Intel Pentium Core Duo 2.0GHz (or equivalent), Mac OS v10.4 (Tiger) or later, 2 Mbps Internet connection or greater and 2 gigs of RAM. For PC, it’s Intel Pentium Core Duo 1.8GHz (or equivalent) and Windows XP or our old friend Vista.)
Hulu throws away Boxee
The free Boxee software and the free Hulu video service made a lot of early adopters happy recently, as streaming online video from the networks flowed effortlessly onto TV screens.
It was, many users said, a vision of the TV medium’s future. A happy-happy-joy-joy vision. Too bad that promising pairing of content and delivery systems has vanished, as of right about now.
Hulu has cut off Boxee, responding to complaints from networks and producers. Hulu, as you probably recall, is a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp., which owns the Fox TV network.
While Hulu works hard to market itself as a hip independent entity, it’s an online video operation owned by control-freak content providers. (It’s a wonder that Hulu exists at all.)
Boxee chieftain Avner Ronen blogged thusly:
“Two weeks ago Hulu called and told us their content partners were asking them to remove Hulu from boxee. we tried (many times) to plead the case for keeping Hulu on boxee, but on Friday of this week, in good faith, we will be removing it.”
Over on the Hulu blog, the word from CEO Jason Kilar (pictured) was, “We are under no illusions about the likely Boxee user response from this move”:
“While we stubbornly believe in this brave new world of media convergence — bumps and all — we are also steadfast in our belief that the best way to achieve our ambitious, never-ending mission of making media easier for users is to work hand in hand with content owners.”
The blog entry goes on to say some carefully worded things about the online video medium’s complexity and Hulu’s “tough mission” of making viewers and providers happy.
Boxee, which admittedly has no particular business model, could find itself back in the shadows after this brush-off from the networks. The entertainment industry, collectively, isn’t all that smart about forward-technologies, but it has learned some hard lessons in the past decade or so. One of those is to not let startups get near their revenue streams.
And, the industry has learned to act before outside technologies burrow their ways into the hearts of viewers.
Blaming Hulu for caving in to corporate interests is a waste of emotional energy, but that hasn’t stopped plenty of people from trying:
“If this is how you treat your users I won’t be a user anymore. Goodbye Hulu.” And for many, it’s hello again to illegal, high-quality, ad-free downloads.
TV.com, from CBS Interactive, meanwhile, isn’t taking a similar take-down notice from Hulu gracefully.
“CBS Interactive is well within its rights to stream Hulu video content on TV.com under its agreement with Hulu. We are evaluating our next steps at this time,” the company said in a statement.
TV.com wasn’t a factor when Hulu and TV.com first hooked up, but CBS has since bought the video web site as part of a larger deal. TV.com’s relaunch of a few months back was ridiculed as a blantant rip of Hulu’s design and functionality.
TV.com and Hulu are now competitors, whether or not CBS wants to admit the obvious. Nothing like a legal threat to get that bad blood flowing.
