And the rest of the entertainment industry as well.

So with our new TV setup in the house, we’ve taken to watching Hulu on the big screen. Overall, it’s pretty good. It’s been relatively fun to watch old shows from time to time, and we’ve even managed to catch some cable shows in there, like White Collar. But the show we have really come to enjoy is Lost.

Now Lost, for those unfamiliar, is a serial. Every show is dependent on every previous episode. So if you haven’t been watching from the beginning, the show really makes no sense. We hadn’t been watching from the beginning, and so when the show was airing, it made no sense. But people whose taste I trust watched the show, and so I used Hulu as an opportunity to get into it. And so we did.

Hulu had what appeared to be 5 seasons online, and so we started from the beginning, sometime over the summer, and watched them sequentially. The show is truly addictive, and each episode ends with lots of questions that the viewer is anxious to get answered. So watching on Hulu, we’d be motivated to watch several episodes in a clip. So far we’ve watched 100 episodes, clocking in at about 45 minutes each.

The most interesting thing about Hulu as a service is the ads. Hulu intersperses one advertisement at each breaking point in the show. You can pause the ad, but you cannot skip it. And because the ad is at most 60 seconds, you can’t effectively up and leave the room to do something else while the ad plays. Instead, you watch that ad. The best you can do to avoid this is to mute the television.

The Hulu advertising paradigm is distinctly different from broadcast television. On broadcast television, nobody watches ads anymore at all. Everyone has a DVR, on their cable box or as an add-on, and when the ad comes on, you pause the tv, get up to use the bathroom, grab a beer or what have you, and when you come back, you fast forward through the commercial. Commercials on regular TV don’t get watched, but on Hulu they do, which to me makes the ads much more valuable.

So it surprises me that Hulu apparently doesn’t charge more per viewer than broadcast. Reportedly, Hulu ad rates are at rock bottom. Hulu shows are filled with the same damn ad over and over again, often for non-profits and PSAs that must have been given away. I can only surmise that TV networks were lying about their viewership previously, thus driving down the ad rates on a per viewer basis, thus screwing themselves over when the number of viewers could be accurately measured (this is not dissimilar to what happened in the print business).

So in any event, there have been rumblings online about how Fox wants to charge for Hulu because they aren’t making any money off of it, and they’ve apparently been pulling shows off the service as well. This is, to say he least, mind-numbingly stupid, as Hulu should be able to generate more revenue per viewer than broadcast and cable can. To reiterate, nobody watches ads on regular TV, but you HAVE to watch them on Hulu. So whatever, maybe Hulu will get shut down in the near future. There’s no stopping the maniacal idiocy of Hollywood executives.

So back to Lost, we go to watch some episodes on Hulu on Friday night and it tells us that we have 4 days to finish watching, presumably a warning that these episodes are now being pulled from Hulu. An annoyance, yes, but we only had a few episodes left to watch, so we settle in to watch them on Friday and Saturday night. And that was when I noticed, they left off the last ten eight episodes.

So the final season of Lost, the season where all the mysteries will presumably be explained, where you’ll get the payoff for the almost 100 hours of time invested in watching, airs on ABC in January. And yet the TV executives decided that the right thing to do would be to air all but the last ten eight episodes on Hulu, and then pull ALL the episodes about a month and a half before the final season is about to air. Why? To leave people hanging? I don’t think so. I think it’s a hold-up.

The first thing I did after noticing that we were missing ten episodes was to go to iTunes and see what they were charging for the missing episodes. And what they were charging was $3/episode! What’s more is that my wife notices that the popularity indicator on the 5th season episodes suddenly spiked where the episodes were missing from Hulu (screenshot here). In other words, ABC or whomever was trying to hold us up for $30 $24 to get caught up on Lost.

Well, Hulu, FUCK YOU!

The show isn’t worth $30 $24. As good as it is, it’s light entertainment. And I’m not paying you $30 $24 for it. I was perfectly willing to watch the commercials on Hulu, commercials I saw over and over again because you don’t know how to fucking sell your fucking ad time properly. I watched Laura explain how she was a PC so many fucking times; I watched ads for Jon BonJovi’s new craptacular album and accompanying tour over and over and over; I watched pompous actors lecture me on how to “green my routine” on your “more you know” PSAs so many times my head fucking hurt, and NOW YOU WANT AN ADDITIONAL $30?!?!?!?!?!

Well, I’m not inclined to give in to a hold-up. So my options are threefold. I can just go onto Wikipedia and read plot summaries to get myself ready for the new season, I can go online and download a high quality bit torrent client and grab the episodes I want overnight (stealing), or I can just forget it altogether and not watch in January.

I’m not going to tell you which option I decided on, but I will tell you this: going online to steal episodes reminds me of getting a fake ID as a kid to grab a beer. It’s not like you want to cheat, but the system is rigged so as to preclude reasonable outcomes. I don’t want to buy ANY TV episodes. I just want to watch when I want, once, and I’m willing to watch a reasonable number of ads, or alternatively to pay a reasonable fee. There is nothing technologically standing in the way of this happening. In fact, it happened without a hitch for 100 episodes, for about 75 hours. But if your business model is to lure me into watching 75 hours of television with ads I can’t skip so as to try and hold me up for $30, well then you’ll excuse me for feeling that you’re a douchebag who isn’t worthy of my respect.

So long as the speed limits were set artificially low, people used fuzz busters. So long as the drinking age is set artificially high, kids will procure fake IDs. And so long as Hollywood is incapable of coming to terms with online viewing on demand, people will continue to use bit torrent.

On a final note, I’ll have you know that there are movies available on bit torrent that should have been available for rent on iTunes a long time ago. As a 37 year old man, I don’t want to sneak around with the online equivalent of a fuzz buster or a fake ID just to watch TV on demand. So can we fix all this already? Because I really do want to be legit.

Tags: Bit Torrent, Hulu, Lost

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 15th, 2009 at 11:12 am and is filed under Humor & Culture, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.