The new Hulu
new.hulu.com
new.hulu.com
Then on each individual episode page, discussion about the show.
Within the viewers, heat graph timelines available showing what parts people watched the most.
All this is gone.
Instead, animated episode titles in a slide show. Can't find a list of episodes available, seems to not exist except by playing catch-the-moving-tile, a frustrating game with little pay off. Discussions are now in a comments section which seems to be empty on most pages. Pages are slow to load.
No doubt the UI experts that created this monstrosity are the best and the brightest, from the latest schools with the most contemporary techniques. They always are.
I am not saying its perfect, but is it nearly as bad as you are making it out to be?
I don't think it gets any easier than this.
It also remembered the last episode I was watching above the other episodes. Perfect.
Before, to pick a season, you had to pick 1 or the highest season, then do a strange paging thing to get all the way back to the first episode. It was a mess.
The viewing area is now larger it seems, with more "black" area around it without having to turn on the night vision thing.
At any rate, as an avid user, I think they nailed it.
1) Boot an ec2 instance in VA, US
2) ssh -D 8888 <ec2hostname>
3) Configure Chrome/FF to use a SOCKS proxy on localhost:8888EDIT : typo
[1] - https://www311.americanexpress.com/BOLWeb/bolfeOrder.do?requ...
http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/21/3257144/bitinstant-bitcoin...
Seriously. I won't jump through hoops to give others my money, broken copyright or not. I don't see a huge push by those companies to change the way things are. Wheres the lobbying for a global copyright or easier access rules? Where are the visible changes? As long as all those efforts don't lead to a change, they won't have my business.
Now back to the topic at hand...
Also, it's irrelevant whether it's Hulu's fault or not. It needs to be brought up regularly, to put pressure on everyone (including Hulu). If we ignore the issue, we accept the status quo.
Look at it another way: for a large number of HN readers this news item is just an annoyance. Something we can't even check out. You see a news item, you click on the link and get a "nyah nyah nothing for you here, just go away". I'd say that merits a mention in the comments.
Of course it's Hulu's fault. Hulu's owned by NBC, FOX, and Disney. I am certain those three content providers could retain world-wide internet streaming rights for their shows and make them available in any number of countries.
As long as they make it impossible for the rest of the 6.4 billion people to watch their site, they're not only leaving money on the table, but they're encouraging people to pirate.
As a viewer, I expect a site like this has to either be niche, or truly all encompassing. I think things like Stargate or Highlander could support their own sites. Comedy Central was smart to do their stuff (South Park, Daily Show, Colbert) by show. CBS even does Star Trek on StarTrek.com. Hulu seems to try to do everything, but fails. I genuinely think they could do better if they spun off niche sites, crediting them all as "Brought to you by Hulu".
Everyone (in the US) gets TV content from the major networks for free -- just connect an antenna to your TV. You can pay to get more content, and access to previous seasons, by subscribing to cable or satellite. Subscribing doesn't reduce the ads at all, just gets you more things to watch.
Hulu is an exact replica of the business model, except using the web instead of radio and cable lines, as the delivery method.
Everyone (in the US) gets TV content from Hulu for free -- just browse to their website. You can pay to get more content, and access to previous seasons, by subscribing to Hulu Plus. Subscribing to Hulu Plus doesn't reduce the ads at all, just gets you more things to watch.
The only difference is that a cable subscription averages more than 10 times the monthly cost of Hulu Plus. To expect to not only pay 90% less than cable, but also eliminate the advertising, is unrealistic.
Netflix isn't going to produce a full prime time lineup of shows every year on $8 per subscriber. Not at the costs networks currently pay for production ($1.5-2 million per episode generally... with hit shows up to $10-15 million per episode). Either the ads stay, or they figure out a way to produce shows of the same quality for much less money.
To give some perspective, more than $60 billion is spent on TV advertising per year in just the US. So if everyone were to just sell subscriptions at Netflix's price, in exchange for new television without ads, they would need to get... every person in the United States (including all the babies) to subscribe. Twice, per person. Just to make up for the ad revenue, ignoring all the lost revenue of people dropping cable subscriptions. Otherwise, the money that currently funds producing these shows just won't exist, so there won't be anything for them to sell you.
There is no future with everyone on an ad-free Netflix for new TV with content that costs as much to produce as today's network television.
I watch a lot of past seasons of shows, and frankly, there are so few ads I barely remember the last one I saw.
The old slideshow was amazingly annoying. You click, it slides by slowly but doesn't reveal the text. You wait some more until the text slowly fades in...nope not interesting. You click again. I would still make the text fade in faster.
The new layout looks very nice. I would make the hover details appear faster as well, only a sliver of time after the play button appears.
The title in the hover-details should be more obviously clickable. Personally, I really don't like having to blindly mouse around until I stumble upon something clickable (even though it seems like the trendy thing to do).
(Also, Amazon Prime streaming is usually HORRIBLE video quality for me, as well as selection. Netflix is really the only non-pirated service with decent selection and quality, and even it really lacks for selection compared to 2y ago. But I don't want to pay $20/movie for iTunes movies.)
Yellowstone (HD) on a Mac (in Chrome) also appears SD-quality. I'm on 100M comcast business, and everything else works fine, with Amazon reporting it's in HD mode with good performance, so I think it's just crap encoding :(
Also, HuluWithMe doesn't work in it.
Other than that, I like it a lot.
Can anyone comment on whether or not things have improved for subscribers?
Edit: Come to think of it, it was more the fact that so many ads repeated, rather than the number or length of them.
The graphics are all really big and takes a bit of scrolling to explore the frontpage, which I don't think is an optimal design choice.
However, its a great redesign overall. Reminds me a bit of Netflix.