Is Hulu Driving People Back to Piracy?

First of all, it's important to differentiate between Hulu and its content partners. I'm willing to bet Jason Kilar didn't make this call.<p>Second, yes, it is a stupid move that shows a lack of foresight. In five or ten years, everyone will have their TV connected to a free web-based source of content. If the content owners wise up, then it will be their source (something like Hulu) and they'll get some ad revenue. If not, then it will be a pirate source instead. As we saw with Napster.....(four years)....iTMS, the sooner the content owners accept the inevitable the sooner they stop losing money.

Hulu is a U.S. service only. Should i find a way to trick hulu that i am from the US, or should i just do a google search with "torrent" at the end of the query?

One thing people have to realize is that this wasn't so much a Hulu decision as it was a Network decision.<p>The networks want to control where you view the hulu content (at your computer). If you're watching it on TV you may as well be paying for cable (in their minds).

What do you mean, "back to"?

South Park is a really great example of how to do online television from a user's perspective.<p>1. They are really good about getting episodes up quickly.<p>2. It's high quality.<p>3. Episodes are never taken down.<p>4. It's ad free.<p><a href="http://www.southparkstudios.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.southparkstudios.com/</a><p>Now granted it doesn't deal with big media's concerns. It's not set up to make money. There are no ads, and the show archive is great, so it could be argued that it removes incentive to by season dvds. think Matt Stone and Troy Parker might be making a little money because of it, but it's from product sales, not from ads.

No, it never did anything for piracy, because it didn't have as much content. I'd venture a guess that most piracy is for brand new movies, not single episodes of shows(for most shoes, some exceptions like Entourage exist obviously)

bad move from the online community. Hulu represents a tenuous olive branch between online content watchers and the big media interests. If this gets screwed up it will be another 5 years before tv gets into the 21st century.

In a word: yes.