14 DAY TRIAL // It is already a common fact that Hulu is not willing to make any exceptions when it comes to other companies embedding its content, and the latest site to find this for itself is Rippol. Therefore, it is not only Boxee and TV.com that were forced to remove Hulu videos from their platforms, and probably Rippol will not be the last one either.
What's more, this project is so recently launched that it still has the “Beta” label displayed on its webpage and it was based on complex algorithms integrated with user recommendations to provide visitors with relevant video suggestions that are most likely to interest them.
Regardless of how interesting this seems to be, Hulu representatives have reacted within a few hours from the official launch and informed Rippol that they were not allowed to embed any of the Hulu videos on their website, because they were violating the Terms of Service (ToS) of Hulu (which clearly states that all its content is exclusively for private, non-commercial usage). The response was that Rippol does not intend to publish any type of advertisements within the streams or around them, but it seems that the mere fact that the website plans to generate revenue comes in contradiction with the ToS.
As a solution to the entire situation, Hulu offered them the possibility to link to the videos in question using its site map: “In the place of the embeds, [what] we can offer you is a site map feed that links back to Hulu for video playback and includes several useful pieces of metadata in a feed. It includes video titles, descriptions, thumbnails, video type, duration info, season number, episode number, air date, expiration date, in addition to the video link on Hulu.com. It is updated every few hours.”
The entire functioning mechanism of Rippol could be summarized this way: it analyzes users’ and their friends’ video activities on its site, then monitors the metadata from all streams, so that in the end, it will be able to find videos and TV shows you will most probably like. Needless to say, some of the results come from Hulu.
As mentioned before, other sites have encountered the same issue with embedded videos, and Boxee was one of those asked to remove Hulu content. Also, just like Rippol, they would be willing to start a distribution agreement with Hulu for their embedded content. Nonetheless, it seems that this type of agreement can be signed only after thorough analysis, since “we are currently entering into these very selectively,” as Hulu officials declared.
It is not a secret that Hulu has partnerships with large companies such as AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo! that allow them to embed its content, and it has also created the option of watching parts of its contents via Facebook pages.
When Hulu was launched in 2007, developers and users alike, encouraged by media speculations, were expecting the new service to have worldwide distribution, as well as to provide integration with numerous applications and platforms. However, it has turned out that the distribution partnerships are highly selective, favoring large companies and leaving the smaller ones and the startups aside, despite the great potential they might present.
To conclude, it appears that the only way for small and innovative projects to gain enough reputation to be taken into consideration for a Hulu partnership is to point their crawlers to numerous third-party domains, as tedious as this might prove to be.