The Latest on Hulu and Netflix

Time to catch up on the latest from these two services.

  • Playboy seems to think Hulu is coming to the Roku Video Player. That would certainly please us. But Roku, the creator of the player, has insisted they have not made any public statements regarding and they don’t know where Playboy gets their information. Roku currently supports Amazon Video on Demand and Netflix, and promised as many as ten new channels by the end of the year but has not yet delivered.
  • appears to not recognize Puerto Rico as part of the United States and is blocking the territory’s use of its Watch Instantly feature, something once did. It explicitly excludes anything outside of the fifty states and the District of Columbia.
  • has added its own application for playing outside of a browser which works on Windows and Mac(but not Linux). In a ‘nod’ to Boxee, certainly a more developed product, the new product originally advised you to kill Boxee on Macs to avoid conflicts. This has since been changed. ’s Terms of Service state that: “You may not download, install or use the Software on any device other than a Personal Computer including without limitation digital media receiver devices (such as Apple TV), mobile devices (such as a cell phone device, mobile handheld device or a PDA), network devices or CE devices (collectively “Prohibited Devices”).” It does not prohibit hooking a computer to a TV, but it seems to suggest this is the thing is trying to forbid, which does not bode well for them.
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One Comment

  • Max Exter says:

    I’ve played a little with Hulu Desktop on my HTPC. Honestly, it performs worse than just running it through a browser (Firefox 3.0.10 in this case) and it has a clunkier user interface. Playback in HD (Hmm.. that’s an unfortunate acronym) was extremely jerky, not due to bandwidth issues, but rather because it was using huge amounts of processing power.

    Maybe the next iteration will fix these problems. Or better yet, maybe they’ll relent and go back to allowing Boxee and others to use it.

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