Et Tu, Hulu? The Epitome of Betrayal
I was thrilled by the announcement that Hulu.com, a long-planned site that showcases free movies and television content in both full length and short clips, had gone LIVE, and hundreds of episodes and films were now available. They describe themselves on the website as “a vast selection of premium video content, on demand, free and ad-supported: full episodes of TV shows, both current and classic, full-length movies, thousands of clips, and much more.” Further information in their ABOUT page states, “Hulu was founded in March 2007 and is a joint venture owned by NBC Universal and News Corp. In addition, Hulu has closed a $100 million investment from private equity firm Providence Equity Partners.”
Finally! a well funded, well-positioned company was positioning itself to make premium content available on the web. The availability of closed captions should be a no-brainer, right? Alas, in what should have turned out to be a long, happy night of exploration turned instead into sheer frustration and disgust as i discovered that only a tiny handful of the content has closed captions. A VERY TINY handful. To make matters worse, the only way to currently find out -what- content has captions, we have to start -each- episiode one-by-one and wait to see if captions appear. Read the rest of this entry »
