Hulu Plus Hits Android Market

Hulu Plus has come to Android….well, sorta, kinda, maybe. If you are one of the few phones (six to be exact) that qualifies for the premium streaming service, be prepared to be entertained. Hulu Plus will run $8 bucks a month and is available from the Android Market.

Hulu's not saying why its own Android app rollout begins with only a half-dozen devices. Except for the Nexus One and Nexus S, the devices that Hulu supports are different from the ones that Netflix supports at this time.

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Kinda silly that only a certain amount of phones are support for these apps.

Ashbringer said:

Kinda silly that only a certain amount of phones are support for these apps.

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But but but Android is teh Open and stuffz.


As much flak as apple gets at least they keep their userbase fragmentation to a minimum. I really wanted an android for a long time but the way its being handled in the marketplace sucks. I'll go with the known evil of Apple versus the wild west anarchy of Android. (Full disclosure: Im currrently running a Palm Pre, fuck you HP)

Fragmentation sucks. There is no doubt about it. But from what I've read, the problem isn't so much the fragmentation of the hardware/software. The real problem is the content owners of the media. They require Netflix and Hulu to jump through so many hoops to approve a device that literally it takes months. It's not a "do this process once for Android and you're good to go" type of thing. Each phone has to be tested over and over again.

Don't hate on the platform, hate the process that TV Networks and MPAA have in place to get devices approved. Let's face it, if someone is going to rip movies/shows from these sites, are they really going to be doing it on their phones? Turns out there are no protections in place for PCs. Why are there so many hoops to jump through for mobile devices?

Herbzilla said:

Turns out there are no protections in place for PCs. Why are there so many hoops to jump through for mobile devices?

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Windows is a fairly standard platform and there are simply too many Windows PCs to ignore for something like Hulu which is something that a lot of people would prefer to use on bigger screen devices than phones anyway.

heatlesssun said:

Windows is a fairly standard platform and there are simply too many Windows PCs to ignore for something like Hulu which is something that a lot of people would prefer to use on bigger screen devices than phones anyway.

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Obviously that's true. But I know a ton of people that would enjoy using these services on tablets. So the question remains, why is it such a pain in the ass to get these mobile devices approved when it's easily accessible on any PC? Why are they blocking the mobile browser versions? Android has Flash and can support video playback no problem.

Herbzilla said:

Obviously that's true. But I know a ton of people that would enjoy using these services on tablets. So the question remains, why is it such a pain in the ass to get these mobile devices approved when it's easily accessible on any PC? Why are they blocking the mobile browser versions? Android has Flash and can support video playback no problem.

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Because we are allowing content providers to declare a distiction between a home computer and a mobile one. IMHO these kinds of splitting up the market should be outright illegal.

Herbzilla said:

Android has Flash and can support video playback no problem.

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Yes and no. There's a lot of variance in the Android world and not everything works equally well across of the devices. Some of this is artificial, some technical. This is one reason why I think Windows 8 on tablets stands to be stiff competition to Android, one standard platform. Fragmentation in open source efforts has always been a problem and for all of its benefits this is a drawback.

Spire3660 said:

Because we are allowing content providers to declare a distiction between a home computer and a mobile one. IMHO these kinds of splitting up the market should be outright illegal.

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I don't think the form factor is the issue, its the OS as Windows 7 does run on tablets that are as mobile at least in terms of weight as a number of Android devices.

Doesn't matter, as I'm sure someone from XDA developers have already got an apk ready that'll work on all devices. Just like they did with Netflix.

Sweet I have an Inspire 4g.

It's not androids fault for the fragmentation, it's the manufacturers and the cell companies. They change the system, add things, remove things, sometimes support updating verisons, other times leaving it obsolete. When you have a samsung galaxy phone that is stuck at android 1.6 it's not gunna do flash, netflix or hulu, and that's samsungs fault not google/android.

Spire3660 said:

But but but Android is teh Open and stuffz.


As much flak as apple gets at least they keep their userbase fragmentation to a minimum. I really wanted an android for a long time but the way its being handled in the marketplace sucks. I'll go with the known evil of Apple versus the wild west anarchy of Android. (Full disclosure: Im currrently running a Palm Pre, fuck you HP)

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Amazon App Store is pretty good.

I had a Palm Pre sadly they didnt want to release anything on Sprint so I got an Evo Shift =\

FYI it doesn't work with rooted GB droid IIs... unfortunately. :-(