Hulu and Blockbuster Versus Fate: A Content Distribution Update

As of a few hours ago (as I type these words mid-morning Friday), MediaMall Techologies’ PlayOn (which I’ve mentioned a number of times before) is unable to access Hulu and Amazon Video On Demand content. The same thing happened two weeks ago, and within two days MediaMall Technologies came up with a workaround. I have little doubt that the company will succeed in circumventing the barriers again; in fact, the support alert built into PlayOn reports that Hulu should be back online via a program auto-update by some time tomorrow morning.

This situation exemplifies the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between Hulu and the various hardware and software companies attempting to expand the service’s reach beyond the PC. You might think that Hulu would welcome third-party assistance, and I suspect that privately Hulu officials might agree with you (after, perhaps, having a few drinks to loosen inhibitions). But as I previously discussed a bit over a month ago, the company is ultimately subordinate to the demands of the movie and television content providers for which it acts as a middleman to viewers. And no matter that I think it’s waging an ultimately un-winnable war, its continued near-term existence is predicated on its willingness to keep up the fight.

Here’s a recent timeline of skirmishes, with Boxee as the primary combatant:

• In mid-February, Boxee and Hulu agreed to (at least temporarily) remove direct access to the service by the Linux-, OS X- and Windows-supportive application. The tenor of the public communication at the time seemed to be one of cooperation and mutual respect…
• …but the gloves came off a few weeks later when Boxee developed a workaround that involved content access via Hulu’s RSS feeds.
• One day later, Hulu started blocking this Boxee back-door maneuver, but Boxee once again rapidly surmounted the raised RSS barrier
• In early April, Hulu started encrypting its HTML stream via Javascript, a punch that both Boxee and PlayOn easily dodged (though as mentioned above, PlayOn went down a few hours later for over a day, and for reasons not yet explained to me by the company)
• And I haven’t yet heard what’s caused the latest PlayOn interruption, though it may involve encryption of the Adobe Flash stream.

To reiterate, I’ve got no particular beef with Hulu; the company’s just doing what the content providers (on which it fundamentally depends for its continued existence) tell it to do. But why am I so confident that its efforts will continue to be fruitless? Boxee, for example, has updated its built-in web browser to an XUL framework-based (also used in Firefox and other Mozilla products) offering. Over time, there’s nothing that would keep Boxee or any other company from embedding a full-featured browser built on Gecko, WebKit or some other open-source foundation. Combine it with an operating system-compatible Adobe Flash plugin, alter the browser’s reported user agent string as necessary for spoofing purposes, and as far as Hulu can tell, you’re accessing it with a Mac or PC.

How does Windows-only PlayOn accomplish its sleight of hand? Confirming my suspicion, here’s what MediaMall Technologies’ Jeff Lawrence revealed in an email to me two weeks back:

Yes, PlayOn uses an instance of the IE Engine to browse online websites, so it is remarkably difficult to effect changes that will break Hulu access through PlayOn, but not through IE. The bottom line is…if it can be displayed in IE, it is possible for any other browser to display it as well…especially those browsers which are based on the same core browsing engine as IE.

Though it is possible future changes may temporarily break things in third party applications (even PlayOn), Hulu really is fighting a silly/losing battle by trying all of these short term blocks. It would be much better to figure out a way to insert more ads into the experience when it detects it is running in a TV environment, versus a PC environment. That way, their content providers would, in theory, be economically indifferent between an episode viewing on the TV through an online Hulu stream versus an on-air broadcast stream.

I am fairly certain that all of these third party companies would volunteer to include an identifying string in its user agent so Hulu could cleanly detect this situation, were Hulu willing to play nice with them. We sure…would be.

And ironically, it’s not even necessary to use PlayOn to access Hulu from the Sony PlayStation 3. The Flash-cognizant browser licensed from NetFront and already integrated within the game console will get you there all by itself, although in an imperfect manner. I was unable to log into my Hulu account, and therefore couldn’t access my content queue, and I also couldn’t convince the browser to enter full-screen Hulu playback mode. Still, it’s a credible start, along with a foreshadowing of content providers’ ever-increasing struggle for access control in the future.

As online-delivered A/V content ramps in popularity, how’s its physical media forebear doing? Not so good, seemingly, and thereby motivating me to lob a gentle ‘I told you so’ at the naysayers who (naively thinking that video won’t sooner or later follow in the footsteps of CD-to-online audio) howl with dismay every time I make a prediction on this particular topic. The DVD-to-Blu-ray conversion continues to atrophy, admittedly due in part (but only in small part) to the troubled economic times. And more generally, the physical media rental and sales ecosystem is in a world of hurt, in spite of the fact that these same troubled economic times are encouraging consumers (as was the case during the Great Depression) to seek out entertainment as a means of temporarily taking their minds off their troubles, and to do so at home as a means of saving money.

Continue reading with part two of this post, ‘Online Content’s Got Game, While The Grim Reaper’s Got Physical Media’s Name‘…