back to article YouTube and Hulu dabble in for-pay vids

Two of the internet's most popular video websites are planning to charge users to watch certain movies and television shows online. YouTube and Hulu both have schemes to erect paywalls around a limited amount of content in order to drum up revenues that online advertising has failed to provide, according to recent …

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  1. cannon
    Megaphone

    corporate take over

    ah well maybe this will be the demise of youtube as the paywalls go up around the web.

    so long and thanks for all the fish.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/hitchhikers/guide/golgafrincham.shtml

  2. Inachu
    Thumb Down

    Grrrrrrrr experiment gone wrong.

    Youtube and hulu will go the same way cable has gone.

    I am sure in the near future even though people pay them, They the media giants will make them watch commercials even though the original intention was to pay to watch video commercial free.

    This was how cable was destroyed by greed.

  3. Combat Wombat
    Pirate

    Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo that..

    I will not be paying to have crappy low def video streamed to me in eye squinty vision

    This is the end of the dream of free media.. it took them 10 years, but the lumbering dinosaur media companies are locking up the content again.

    In 5 years, everything will be paywall, and they will be chasing the last few torrent sites into oblivion

    It was fun while it lasted.

    Now we will see more and more crippling DRM on both physical media, and I am sure we will see the media companies achieve their holy grail of making you pay every single time you watch something.

    Whether that something be on physical media, or online.

    There will always be those who will crack the DRM, but really all the media companies have to do, is make it a non trivial matter for non techies

    I am not a freetard... I buy music and DVD's that I like.

    I am just dreading the day that my player only lets me watch a disk x number of times, before it says *insert credit card to continue*

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Pirate

    Downloads Anyone

    Not only is Hulu's content, but now Youtubes paid content is available in the US only. Since I don't reside in the US, does anyone know where I can download a pirate copy so I can watch them as well?

    (Disclaimer - This is meant as sarcasm and not an actual request for help in piracy)

  5. heyrick Silver badge

    Will it support YoutubeDownloaderHD?

    I ask because YouTube-to-me is often not able to keep up with complex (higher bandwidth) videos in standard naff resolution.

    It isn't my connection or my computer, no problems watching NRJ Hits at 774kbit/sec (glad I don't have a capping!). http://fr.wwitv.com/tv/b4212.htm

    But with YouTube, I tend to download everything and toss it to MPlayer. At least that way I know it'll run from end to end without seeing the spinny-circle-dots thing when the player runs out of available data...

    But no, I'm sure there will be a "download to watch" option (eventually), but it'll require specific software and carry plenty of DRM baggage, like nobody ever learned from the fail that was DRM'd music.

  6. Disco-Legend-Zeke
    Thumb Up

    Netflix already has the best model.

    You can pay as little as $10 a month and get NETFLIX Streaming included.

    Getting a Netflix button was half the requirements in our Blu-Ray brand selection. (the other half was the ability to play AVCHD authored with blue ray menu system. Samsung still can't do it (although their NETFLIX ability was excellent.)) // sorry i LISP sometimes

    NETFLIX has already signed STARZ, presumably getting the same deal a cable operator would get. If i had a catalogue, i would try to become a partner|owner of NETFLIX.

    I have a 3K DSL from my local phone company, and the picture quality is 7 bars out of 10, during peak hours dropping to 6.. slightly better than DVD quality. Their current capacity, according to a spokesgirl, was 720P, so 8 megs or so provides a reasonable guidline for substantially nice pictures.

    There is room for other players in the monthly subscription arena, the pay per view model is also a valid one. The cable TV outfits are already doing one or both.

  7. Scott Holland

    I'll only pay for performance

    If these guys want to start charging for "premium" content, then the performance when delivering such content had better go WAY up. I can live with lower video resolutions, and not-theater-quality audio. But, I will refuse to pay for something that freezes every 2 minutes because they don't want to pay for the servers and bandwidth.

    Unlike YouTube (at least currently), you can't just pause a Hulu vid and let it buffer the whole thing. Hulu's licensing deal with the studios forbids them from buffering more than 5 minutes of video. So, these guys will need to either cook up custom apps that will encrypt everything and allow you to buffer the whole thing to your HD. Or, they will need serious upgrades to their infrastructure.

    The only way I ever found Hulu tolerable, was to use one of those Hulu downloader apps that saves the vid to your drive. But that's a running battle between Hulu blocking them and the downloaders countering. I grew tired of this battle, and stopped using Hulu.

  8. adnim

    We could always...

    encourage them further and endorse such practices by using the services.

    Alternatively...

  9. Steve Roper
    Unhappy

    Greg Bear's prophecy

    is coming to pass.

    In his 90s cyberpunk novel "Slant" he describes a world about 500 years from now in which the Internet has become a full-immersion experience (whimsically called "yox") in which everything, absolutely everything, is trademarked, patented, copyrighted, registered and controlled by big media which charges by the second for everything you do online. He called it a "dataflow economy" and described it as a dystopian future in which the common people were systematically bled dry paying for sensational garbage while the real news and entertainment had become a prerogative of the rich.

    With Murdoch and his paywalls, and now this - here it comes...

  10. ChessGeek

    You can...

    ...charge a horse for water, but you can't make him drink.

  11. Goatan
    FAIL

    available to the US

    Becasue the interent does not exist outside of America

  12. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    What do you expect?

    From unbridled capitalism. I personally will go back to P2P and download the episodes I want to watch. Fuck the Studios, the MPAA the RIA and the horses they rode in on. Why can't we go the BBC route and pay a single yearly fee and do away with ads altogether. Not to mention the fact that most US tv is pure shit anyway.

    1. Oninoshiko
      WTF?

      wait...

      so rather then CHOOSING to pay for crap, you want to be REQUIRED to pay for crap...

      BRILLIANT!

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hulu has always a pay for video site

    Hi, I was just hidden, if you watched a movie clip only, there was always a link to buy a download stream of the full movie from Amazon for a few bucks.

  14. Philip Harvey
    FAIL

    FAIL

    USA only = FAIL.

    Good thing the rest of the world has eztv.

    I REALLY DO WANT TO PAY FOR MOVIES AND TV SHOWS. I just wish there was a way for people outside of the USA to do it. Studios complaining about piracy rings pretty hollow when I try to pay for content only to be told the content can not be sold since I don't live in the USA....

  15. Mike VandeVelde
    Pirate

    wholu?

    Oh yeah Hulu - those are the links you find all over, especially cluttering up Google search results, that always lead to "ONLY AVAILABLE IN USA". I've learned to not even see them, kind of like amanfrommars posts.

    Youtube is going to blah blah blah blah only available in the USA.

    Yawn. Carrying on.

  16. Tony Paulazzo
    Happy

    Ignore the man behind the curtain.

    >YouTube movie rentals — as planned thus far — will be available to US users only<

    So close, see, i wanna watch The Big Bang Theory and a few other American shows, not a couple of months after my American cousins, but at the latest, a day later, so when reading chatter on the 'global net' forums I don't get spoilers. I'd even pay for low quality Youtube streaming (after all, it's not porn), but if it's USA only, what's the point? No free ride for the middlemen? from tv station via youtube to me - direct income for them. Meanwhile, as previously noted, the rest of the world will happily dl it from whatever channels are available.

    Games developers have finally realised direct download content nets them almost pure profit, sometimes in the millions.

    >In 5 years, everything will be paywall, and they will be chasing the last few torrent sites into oblivion<

    Yea, just like murder, rape, theft and other undesirable things have been consigned to human history... oh wait.

    Netflix isn't available in the UK.

    >a dystopian future in which the common people were systematically bled dry paying for sensational garbage while the real news and entertainment had become a prerogative of the rich.<

    I've read a couple of Bear books, must check it out. Couple of things, don't herds always follow the thing in front? Xfactor, lemmings, cliffs etc? and I doubt the rich know what's real any more than the serfs, and their enjoyment is probably akin to the Moorlocks and Eloi. Blood Music is brilliant by him.

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