Foiled by GeoFiltering

I just arrived in Spain and had some time to kill. I flipped through the TV channels and decided that there is only some much CNN I can watch, and my 3 years of high school Spanish (that I took 20 years ago) has somehow failed to provide me with the tools I need to fully appreciate Spanish language programming.

So, I was excited by the prospect of logging into Hulu and catching up on a couple of shows I missed last week. Foiled!

Anyone know a good trick for getting around geofilters? I thought I could use Google Translate to trick it into thinking I was in the US, but that didn't work. Suggestions anyone?

Hulu Hoop

I just got my invite to the Hulu beta yesterday and am diving into it now. My first impressions are that it's pretty elegant. Very good video quality, clean design and nice flash player. You can even edit your own clips and just post the piece you want.

As for content, there is a bunch of current NBC and Fox shows (The Office, Heroes, Friday Night Lights, The Simpsons, House, Prison Break, etc.), some old shows (Simon & Simon, WKRP in Cinncinati) and even a few movies (Sideways, The Jerk, The Breakfast Club).

And now for your viewing pleasure, my current favorite network show:



And one of my all-time favorite network series (may it rest in peace):



The problem? They don't let you easily change the size of the embedded player, I had to go in and manually edit the object width on each of the videos above to get them to fit...

NBC - Almost a Good Online TV Experience

I applaud NBC for providing a huge amount of TV content on the web for free (streaming at least). I'm pretty good about recording my shows, but this week my cable went out and therefore I missed a bunch of my favorites. In the past, I have watched episodes online at NBC.com without much trouble and was pleased with experience - high quality video resolution, low buffering times, clean flash player experience, light on commercial interruptions.

Where the flaws get exposed though is when you try to move that experience to your living room. I have a graveyard in my basement with headstones for a myriad of devices designed to move PC-bound content to your home theater (with the honor of my earliest/first such device being the "Audiotron" from Turtle Beach). I've now simplified my set up a bit by simply taking my MacBook down to the basement, plopping it down next to the TV and running a DVI-to-HDMI cable to my TV and mini-jack to RCA to my stereo. Decidedly low-tech but works great for this purpose.

So, back to my story.... I did this to watch a bunch of missed NBC shows this week. Easy enough.... click play, select "fullscreen" and then go sit on the couch. Now the problems... there was 1 pre-roll ad and 5 commercial breaks during the show. I don't fault them for that at all. The problem is that every time it hit a commercial it would kick out of full-screen mode back into normal size (oh yeah, and I had to stand there waiting for the 30 second pre-roll to end before I could select "fullscreen" to begin with). So, 5 times during the show I had to get up, walk across the room and reselect "fullscreen". NBC, if you are listening, please fix this - I can't imagine it's a hard problem to solve.

Problem #2... I was watching Friday Night Lights (apparently the target demo for that show is middle-aged women) and I got the *same* ad every single commercial break (Dove Body Wash). C'mon, I had just watched The Office and 30 Rock... is that all they could come up with to advertise to me?

TV online has come a *long* way... but still has a little bit further to go. I've signed up to get on the beta for Hulu, let's hope they can get us a bit closer.