Colbert & Daily Shows removed from Hulu, effective today

I watched both shows last night on their websites instead of Hulu, which I had become accustomed to.

One thing I noticed immediately: Way more commercials. Where Hulu only had a single commercial per break, Comedy Central had about 3 per break. Another thing was that the commercials they played were more "real." I don't know what experience others have had on Hulu, but it seemed a huge percentage of their commercials were repeats of the same one or two - and often they were a PSA-type of thing. I always found that strange as they only showed one commercial per break and, by all accounts, it was a ludicrously cheap one. They couldn't have been making nearly as much per show as Comedy Central is going to be making now if they can keep all those slots sold. The additional commercials were annoying, but not the end of the world.

It seems that Comedy Central's player is one of those that degrades quality when the connection gets slow whereas Hulu would just stop and buffer. After only watching two shows it's hard to know how well it'll work in general, but it didn't stop and buffer once last night. I often had much more frustrating experiences with Hulu on account of the sometimes frequent buffering pauses. (Mediacom is not the world's best ISP...)

The primary downside here is that I've been using Hulu Desktop as my television provider for a couple months now. After ABC moved Castle to Hulu, I lost all reason to play the website shuffle when trying to watch a show and (aside from the buffering) it had become a very nice self-contained experience. Now that The Daily Show and Colbert are off the network, I'm back to manually switching players which is certainly a hassle.

I'd personally rather have an iTunes-style downloaded media service for television than streaming. It'd be far more reliable. I don't care if the files auto-expire after a number of days of not watching an episode or if I don't "own" the copy. I just hate the unreliable streaming and I also hate messing around with all the players. I think Apple's in a great position to offer something like this (tie TV show downloads with their rental infrastructure, perhaps, and then offer up all TV as a subscription). I longly await for such a solution to appear.

Since all my entertainment is through podcasting, I was relying on Hulu's RSS feeds. Now they're gone, I had to "pipe" together my own:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=85fec6c2bde9b5525...

and

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=5f8d5d516ff18a791...

This sucks for Hulu, and this sucks for the consumer on a convenience level, BUT at the end of the day, I'm happy to hear "rumors" that Comedy Central is making money by doing this which only means to me that the shows will stay available online longer for free.

I think there's a learning curve to this Internet entertainment business, and if we want to keep our expensively produced entertainment, maybe it comes at the price of having to visit other websites and watch commercials.

Beats a subscription payment if you ask me.

Only from Hulu - they'll still be available for online viewing on their respective websites, which Viacom claims it has been able to successfully monetize.

Availability remains unchanged in India though :-)