Two Slashes

I could be lame and start off yet another post with gripes about how I don’t update this blog enough myself.  (Oh, wait, I just did.)  Suffice it to say that I’ve been busy with school, a bit of work, and some TV shows I’ve become interested in (which is a bit of a surprise, actually).  I recently discovered Fox’s new(ish) series Lie to Me, and I’ve been busy catching up on the previous season over the course of the past few days.

Alright, so maybe my post isn’t really about what I’ve watched recently, but more so how I’ve gone about it.  Actually, I probably don’t even need to mention that, but let’s just say that Hulu hasn’t been all that helpful.  And, if the news that’s just started spreading is true, it probably won’t be helpful to me for much longer, even to catch up on shows I already watch.

According to a few different news outlets, Hulu announced today that they would be transforming into a paid service sometime after the new year in an attempt to build the “Great Paywall of Television.”  While the timing bit is great news for those of us who want to make sure we see the Christmas specials of our favorite shows, it most certainly isn’t a good way to ring in the new year.  And the choice, given broadcast television’s traditional format of ad-supported free-to-watch broadcasts, is quite interesting.  Hulu claims that they’ll be leaving some content available for people who don’t want to break out their wallets, but I find it hard to believe that the new paid system will pull viewers in with the same level of effectiveness.  (But hey, what do I know?  I’m the guy who said Google Wave sucked only to end up with a few well-formulated comments about why it doesn’t.)

I’m a little confused, really, as it’s exactly this sort of behavior that causes people to download their music, movies, television shows, and software from questionable places.

If Hulu is going to go down this route, though, they’ll need to satisfy this list of demands (add any additional suggestions in the comments):

• For any show Hulu carries, the entire catalog must be available at all times.  If I’m able and willing to pay for the service, I had better be able to watch whatever I please.  If I want to make some popcorn and watch “Three Stories,” I’d better not have to wait until Fox decides to let Hulu run through the first season again.Consider it another way:  for the price of a few months, I can get a portable hard drive.  On this portable hard drive, I can store all the TV shows and movies I want and watch them anywhere I happen to have access to a computer.  (Given that my laptops have been following me around almost constantly as of late, this isn’t even a problem anymore.)  And I won’t have to wait for the show to buffer or sit through ads to watch it, either.
• Again, because I’m paying the bandwidth bills in the first place, I’d better be able to use the video in more than just my browser or the resource hog Hulu calls a desktop client.  I’d like to be able to put a few episodes of 24 on my ZEN, if you don’t mind.Nobody said that the downloaded episodes had to come without strings attached (watermark them, for all I care), but, as I pointed out already, any fool can grab a video from the newsgroups and load it onto their iPod.
• I really don’t care if it’s against my cell phone carrier’s data policy or not, but it’s not up to Hulu to decide that my phone (and anything attached to it) are not suitable mediums for watching shows.  If AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, or any other carrier has a problem with it, they can deal with it in their own method.  It’s not up to you to decide, and my first reaction to you trying to tell me what I can and cannot do with what I pay for is to tell you to sod off while I go somewhere else.

The way I see it, Hulu’s turning into a cute little portable polygraph detector, and all the other ways I can watch TV are like the egg.  They both have their downsides, but one appears to be “technologically superior” (bear with my metaphor) without really getting anything new or exciting done at the same time.  They might want to re-think their position before they end up found guilty of screwing up their business plans to the point where they can’t be recovered.

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It doesn’t take a meteorologist to predict the tsunami that a preview of Google’s new Wave platform would cause.  I can’t click one link without seeing three different remarks referencing the hot new app, though I can’t seem to understand why people are so excited about it.

In case you’ve got a bad memory or hearing loss, I’ll quickly give an overview of Wave to save the sanity of my remaining readers before delving into just what about the platform I don’t like.  For the uninitiated, Wave is a platform Google announced this summer that combines document editing, an e-mail-like environment, live collaborative capabilities, and enhancements provided by “robots” (as opposed to the generally used “bot”) into a single unified experience.  Everything is done in real-time, so modifications you’re in the middle of can be observed by anyone else in that particular thread (referred to as a wave).  It’s an open platform, so anybody can write a “robot” or extend the API, but so far I haven’t seen anything remotely productive beyond a Twitter bot or various games.  (Maybe I’m just ignorant.)

Along with Google’s original announcement, they offered developers early access as they tweaked a few things so that when preview time came about (now, in other words), there would be plenty of examples and enough bragging rights to go around.  It was also a great way to acquaint people with an enhanced interest in the product (like myself), and I was one of the lucky people selected to get in on the sandbox.

I never developed anything for Wave, let alone used it for anything productive, but I did spend a few minutes chatting with a few friends who also found themselves with sandbox access and a little too much boredom in their lives.  I also watched as several people immediately decided to turn their sights towards robots geared to spam ads and utter nonsense (including one bugger that kept embedding YouTube videos of Rick Astley’s hit song…yeah, that one).  All the same, with just a handful of friends and a low signal-to-noise ratio, I really didn’t see a point in regularly checking the site.

When Google finally announced their semi-public preview (read:  everybody sends invitations everywhere), I was unsure of whether I even wanted to bother with it.  It’s not to say that I don’t like Google (I have several domains running Google Apps, a few Gmail accounts, a Google Voice account or three, and some extra paid storage to boot), but the nasty taste from the developer’s preview combined with the fact that I didn’t think too many friends would bother with it left me undecided but leaning towards not bothering to move my account into the preview.

It goes without saying that I got bored and ported the account anyway, and I’ve asked myself why I bothered ever since.

The way I see it, Wave is something of a novelty at this point in time and in its current state.  It’s not useful to anybody (at least, anybody I know), and it doesn’t do anything I find worthwhile that I can’t already implement or find support for, either in another Google app (think Docs and Gmail in particular) or elsewhere.  And the fact that it isn’t integrated with Gmail is a disappointment, as I feel that they could have turned Gmail into a legitimate killer app by adding Wave as a Gmail Labs option (which keeps the opt-in approach for people who decide they want to “catch the Wave”).

In fact, I’m wondering why Google didn’t opt for the b@$*@&d-child approach in the first place, because as-is Gmail just isn’t the innovative utility it was when it first launched.  Yahoo! offers more space (namely, as much as you want for free), and there’s really nothing of note at this point that the Google/Gmail experience offers that can’t be found elsewhere.  Being a plugin for a service that a good number of people use, though, offers a much wider userbase and might pull in some people who otherwise might not even be aware of Wave’s existence.  Google’s always touted Gmail as the “revolutionary” e-mail platform, but there’s nothing revolutionary about being second fiddle overall.  (A free Exchange server?  Seriously, this is the best they can offer?)

And, rather than forcing the user to keep two tabs or windows open so they can monitor both their incoming messages and Wave updates, the integration would be a step in the right direction.  (I really think they should look into developing Google Insight, the Google-powered, web-based alternative to Outlook with one-click access to everything.  Outlook…Insight…get it?  Bah!)

And I know I’m not the only person thinking that Wave is really over-hyped.  I’ve talked with several friends who were excited to get their invites, only to have their hopes and dreams wipe out, and the people who start threads with me seem to abandon them after just a few minutes.

Like the beach, Wave is just one more thing I don’t see myself visiting regularly.  It’s not to say that I won’t try to check it (on occasion), but there’s really no compelling reason for me to do so.  If I really had a need for a collaborative environment where the features Google provides are exactly what I’m looking for, maybe I’d feel differently.  But, as of now, I can’t see this taking off until someone finds a better use for it.  I’d sooner pay for an Evernote subscription than have to deal with any more water metaphors.

This really sums it up.