Fox stops next day on demand viewing of it’s programs on Hulu Plus
Yesterday evening, my wife and I sat down to watch Warehouse 13 on Hulu Plus on our HTPC in our living room and found the below screenshot instead of the latest episode of the program.
The long and the short of it; Fox are limiting their shows on streaming media services such as Hulu Plus. Instead of being able to view the programs next day after broadcast, now we’ll have to wait a minimum of 8 days and upto 30 days after broadcast. Obviously this is an attempt by the TV networks to claw back customers that have ditched them for online services such as Hulu & Netflix.
Of course, if you want to view the programs the day after broadcast on Hulu, you can still have access if you pay $60+ per month for cable TV access and link your cable account to your Hulu account. Personally I have no inclination to pay any cable TV company $60+ for basic cable, of which 95% of their programming I have no interest in watching. I’ll just watch a month in arrears!
I do realise that this is old news, but it hasn’t affected us until now, hence this blog post.
I wouldn’t even bother with those online services, especially since there are easy to use websites that offer access to the latest TV shows hosted in Europe. Just have a look at eztv.it and see how broad their offers are, I even got my grubby hands on the latest Red Dwarf episodes there
Unfortunately here in the US of A, the government is in the pocket of the big media conglomerates and come down very heavy of torrent downloaders, grossly disproportionate punishment for the crime of course, fines running into the millions and even upto five years in federal jail, you can get a lesser sentence for killing someone!
We could always get around that mate, I could download the episodes here, make them available on a secure ftp server here and you could collect them without them having the faintest idea what the hell you just downloaded.