Hulu Do They Think They're Kidding?
OK, there's "stubborn", there's "obsessed", and then there's "Hulu". You know, like in "Man, that guy's trying to cure a headache by banging his face into the wall! I think he's gone completely Hulu."
According to TunerFreeMCE's Martin Millmore (per Engadget), Hulu has begun encrypting their site's HTML code at the server and decrypting it at the browser using JavaScript. Think about that for a moment: they are going to all the trouble to scramble the HTML so they can shoot it out to your browser with an embedded JavaScript that does nothing but make your browser's JavaScript plugin decrypt the whole thing again.
This is sort of the equivalent of printing an ad for the opening of a new pizza joint in Egyptian hieroglyphs and shipping it to all your potential customers via overnight mail — taped to a full-scale copy of the Rosetta Stone. Yeah, you could do it , but WHY? It's a pizza ad, not the access codes to Cheyenne Mountain! Who cares if someone opens and reads it? In fact, you hope someone else will read it — that's one more potential customer! You've taken something you want people to see, made it harder to see at great expense (with much potential for a screw-up that leaves the target unable to read it), and done the whole thing in the most roundabout way possible.
Welcome to the wacky world of the control freak mentality, where it is better to leave a million people in the dark to prevent one poor slob who doesn't fit the marketing profile from lighting a candle.
Since pretty much any modern browser runs JavaScript, your browser will notice the difference only when something goes wrong with your JavaScript plugins or settings. (And we know that never happens, right?) It would seem to me that there would be at least a small speed hit to the page rendering, but I'm no JavaScript expert by any means. Maybe some of you can tell me in the comments.
The only possible utility of such a move by Hulu is to continue their campaign of keeping Hulu's videos off your living room TV, and restricted to your computer screen where they think it belongs. (We've talked about this here before...) Though IE, Safari and Firefox may run the site just fine, any service that tries to "scrape" and reorganize the video links won't have the decryption script and the links will fail. (At least, that appears to be the theory.)
In my earlier entry, I discussed the utter insanity of the core of this idea. But let me sum up here. The whole idea of Hulu is to provide a legal place to watch TV shows after they air, on demand, for free (with limited ads built in) as a revenue-generating alternative to the utter ease of just downloading those shows illegally from links provided by several dozen BitTorrent sites. That idea is a very good one. If people can get the shows they want to see (which are available free on TV anyway) easily enough, most of them will happily stream them and watch an ad or two and pass up pirated downloads. Apple built one hell of a business on the similar idea that people would pay 99 cents a song to download music that they could get for free as pirated downloads, if buying it was made easy enough.
But the Powers That Be (basically, the content providers who created Hulu and supply the shows) draw the line at allowing you to watch television shows on (gasp!) a television set. You have to watch on a computer. Otherwise, you are an unworthy lout and they don't want you as a customer. If you like TV on TV, they don't want your business and keep your filthy eyes off their ads, thankyouverymuch!
Huh?
The excuse given by Hulupologists(1) is that Cable TV providers will riot and burn the offices of the content providers if they allow these shows to touch TV sets. "Not our fault — we have to keep the cable people happy because they pay the bills!"
Sorry, that doesn't hold water. Here's why.(2)
A. The cable providers don't pay the bills. The viewing public pays the bills, ultimately, for cable and Hulu and every other consumption of the video product. And the viewing public wants to watch TV on a TV set most of the time. And Hulu knows this already. If not, why does Hulu have all those expensive star-studded TV ads promoting Hulu to TV viewers? If all you want is people who already are glued to their computers, you only need to advertise on the web.
B. It's been too late to put this genie back in the bottle ever since Sony Corp. of America vs. Universal City Studios, Inc. was decided in the Supreme Court in January 1984. That's the "Betamax ruling" that established that noncommercial, nonprofit use of a VCR to "time-shift" broadcast programming was fair use of such programming. If you can't sell that, imagine trying to sell the idea that freely available programming on a computer screen somehow becomes infringement when you watch it on a TV screen instead — without making an unauthorized copy of the programming at all!
C. A browser is a browser is a browser. IE is a browser. Safari is a browser. And so is Boxee. (In fact, Boxee is officially "powered by Mozilla"!) A difference that makes no difference is no difference. Boxee runs on Windows PCs and Linux PCs and Macs and Apple TVs. They're all computers and they all use a variety of display devices. What is the difference between a TV set and a computer monitor? Watch a TV show on a Hulu link using Safari (and they encourage you to embed Hulu videos to your own sites, too, gang) on a Mac Mini attached to a huge Apple monitor. That's OK by everyone. Hook that same Mac Mini to a TV set and watch. Is that OK? If not, why not? And how would they stop you? Maybe it really doesn't matter enough to worry about. Now do the same thing via a browser (for argument's sake, let's call this mythical browser something like.. oh, I dunno... "Broxie") on an Apple TV. Suddenly, the world is coming to an end? Please.
So Hulu is artificially limiting their audience, thumbing their noses at a majority of their potential audience (more TVs than computer monitors out there, mate), making the viewing more complicated for the customers they do want through unnecessary encryption crapola, and making themselves look like jackasses in front of the whole online world — and for what? To prevent something that cannot be prevented. I assert it is technically impossible to block Hulu videos from being viewed on the family room TV by one means or another without throwing the baby out with the bathwater and making Hulu basically unwatchable by everyone. Good gravy, I can't imagine why they even want to try to prove me wrong on that — but apparently, they do. Is there a cluestick big enough to knock this idea out of the heads of the people making the rules for Hulu?
I don't need to invent a word for this sort of futile and useless pursuit. There already is one.
(1) "Hulu" + "apologist" = "Hulupologist". I made that word up — feel free to use it. Honest. I promise not to sue you later. I am not and never have been represented by the RIAA or MPAA. At least I don't think so.
(2) OK, I stole the "Here's why" riff from RoughlyDrafted. Maybe Daniel Eran Dilger will sue me.
Comments