The Screengrab : hulu

We Be Jaman

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:45:00 GMT

With bandwidth cheaper than ever, the international tech market booming, and investors eager to find some new tax shelter in which to dump their millions, the internet is in the midst of a multimedia boom not seen since the late 1990s. And hey, we all know how well that ended, right? Yes, there's probably another massive crash coming, but that doesn't mean that in the meantime, office drones can't kill those long empty hours between lunch and five o'clock with exciting new ventures like Hulu and now Jaman.

Founded by Indian-American enterpreneur Gaurav Dhillon and backed by Hearst money, Jaman is an online on-demand video rental service, similar to those offered by Apple and Netflix, but focusing on an entirely different market. Jaman will, with the exception of a few Golden Age blockbusters that were out of copyright control (like Audrey Hepburn's Charade) focus on independent films for an English-speaking audience, and foreign-language titles -- espeically the wildly popular Bollywood genre so beloved by a growing Indian diaspora -- for the audience it's hoping to reach overseas. Hoping to tap into the underserved markets in tech-savvy countries like Brazil, Russia, India and China, where most people rely on DVD pirates for most of their movie needs, Dhillon is focusing on foreign language movies as both a source of cheap profit and a means towards building an audience. To help build that audience, they're set to offer an introductory deal that will applie to indie fans everywhere in the U.S. as well: free (well, ad-supported) access to a library of over a thousand indie films via the site's streaming browser windows.

Lest anyone get too excited over the prospect, Jaman is also hard-selling the 'social networking' aspect of their site, using those magical words, speaking of the 1990s, that everyone seems to find necessary but no one seems to have thought up a way to make money with so far. Still, the prospect of at-will callups of hundreds of inde flicks will keep us interested in the site...until the Great Crash of 2010, anyway.

Hulu Hulu Boys

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:45:00 GMT

After innumerable delays, technical difficulties, rights management issues, and internal struggles over the business model and terms of service, Hulu.com is finally fully online.

The video-on-demand service, a costly but widely hyped venture of NBC/Universal, was announced to great fanfare last year, and those writers and industry insiders who got a sneak preview (although its form and delivery, at the time, were much different than they are now) announced that it would be a major event when it finally debuted; some even went as far as to call it the savior of television (and a positive boon to the movie industry as well, although the usual DRM issues ended up largely sinking that possibility). What no one anticipated -- not even Hulu's management -- was the long delays they would face in getting their site completely online and functional.

Delays, however, didn't completely sink the product; although it remains to be seen whether users will flock to it in droves -- justifying the advertising outlay that's projected to keep the project financially afloat -- early reports have been good. The service essentially offers viewers high-quality video downloads (not hi-def or even TV quality, but far superior to the usual YouTube level of clarity) with very fast download speeds of movies and television shows, at the cost of watching a few ads. It's nothing more or less than you'd see on commercial television.

The major upside: a number of movies available in their entirety, whenever you want to watch them (although the parsimonious paranoia of the big studios keeps the selection pretty low, you can still see 28 Days Later, Mulholland Drive, and Some Like It Hot, among others, from start to finish anywhere with an internet connection, for free), and a huge number of TV shows (including the most recently aired episodes of The Simpsons and the entire series run of Arrested Development, for example) for nothing more than a simple registration. The downsides: limited selection of movies, no bonus features, limited interface control, and worst of all, no ability to download. But it's fast, it's free, and it's legal, and if nothing else, it represents one of the very few instances in recent memory of the big entertainment conglomerates actually using digital technology to their advantage and offering it as a choice to their customers, rather than treating it as a suspicious interloper to be fought off at worst and treated like an unwelcome guest they hope will go away at best.

Hulu: Destroying Worker Productivity One Movie at a Time

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Are you down with Hulu yet? The latest online on-demand viewing site launched two weeks ago, and is drawing rave reviews for its library of free TV shows and movies. The former is none of our business here at the Screengrab (although just look at all those episodes of Archie Bunker’s Place!), but the latter is…well, let’s just call it a work in progress.

Not that we’re complaining; Hulu is just getting started, after all. You can watch a movie for free as long as you’re willing to sit through a trailer of Baby Mama, and the video and sound quality is certainly leaps and bounds beyond your YouTubes. But for the moment at least, the selection is a bit sparse and, how shall we say…random. The most popular items are of relatively recent vintage: Ice Age, Fever Pitch, 28 Days Later and The Big Lebowski are all available if you’re looking to burn off the rest of your work day. But there are also some more obscure offerings, like 1958’s Attack of the Puppet People, John Huston’s The Barbarian and the Geisha, and both Dr. Goldfoot movies starring Vincent Price.

It’s hard to know where to start. Arnold Schwarzenegger (or “Arnold Strong” as he was billed) in Hercules in New York? Cheech & Chong in The Corsican Brothers? How about the 1977 version of The Island of Dr. Moreau? You can browse the full list here, but if you end up getting fired, don’t blame us.