Hulu for sale and it's future in doubt. Another blow to streaming?

[valnar]

Originally Posted by clayfree

They complain about bandwidth now when they feel their cable business is threatened but look how fast they all jumped on VOIP so they could stick a knife in the telcos. Didn't hear a single word about bandwidth then.

You pay for that, just like you would a POTS line. Their network was built to handle that. If you have a VoIP provider giving it you for free, let me know!

Originally Posted by david1234

There just isn't any technical reason for all the middle-men, when we can go anywhere online that we want.

How are you going to get online, pray tell?


If you think the way you vision everything should work, will work, then by all means build your own ISP and sign up people where you give them unlimited bandwidth for $50/month. Try it and let me know how you make out.

[clayfree]

Originally Posted by david1234

I really don't see any reason for the Cable Co's or even for middle-men like Netflix/Hulu/Apple/Google anymore.

Imagine if we could get everyone to agree to an actual internet video standard, there's no reason that if I want to watch something on Discovery I couldn't go direct to the source and point my "TV Appliance" at shark-week.discovery.com. I want to watch a Packers game, same thing, point my box at video.packers.com.

There just isn't any technical reason for all the middle-men, when we can go anywhere online that we want.

I certainly hope that's where it goes. A common standard available on many platforms. A user just adds the channel and log in information and content is displayed in whatever interface that device uses. The ability to search across all subscribed channels without navigating individual channels.

I really think that's what Google envisioned but the business and content providers would not agree to it.

[valnar]

Granted these are not land-lines, but here is another sign that online streaming will not be the wave of the (immediate) future.

http://www.dailytech.com/Verizon+Unv...ticle22076.htm

My take is this: Since broadband providers can't, won't or are unable to restrict certain specific behavior, like Spam or Bittorrents, they just impose a bandwidth limitation across the board which effectively cuts off that kind of activity.

[OneOfMany]

It's funny how things are going full-circle. I remember the first dial-up plans paying per minute of use. So now I'm gonna pay per GB. Streaming will die as soon as the advertisers find out how much they are going to have to pay, and how little their ad will give them a ROI.

Grant