International Video, featuring iPlayer vs Hulu

Today, John Gruber linked to the just-out-of-beta video site, Hulu. Paid for by NBC and Fox, it allows you to catch up on TV shows online, via a Flash-based video widget that can be embedded on your own site. The videos are pretty good quality, and there's a good selection. Unfortunately, 95% of the world's population can't really use Hulu. Sure, they can browse it, and see what's there, but when you get to a video, it displays a message saying "this video is currently not available in your region". (The link was updated while I was writing this post to note that very fact, but I've seen other commentary which blithely ignores it.)

Sometimes the boot is on the other foot. Last year, the BBC launched iPlayer, a video site paid for by the BBC that allows you to catch up on TV shows online, via a Flash-based video widget that can be embedded on your own site (sounds familiar, huh?) Of course, just like Hulu, it uses geolocation on IP addresses to limit the people who can use it; only UK users can watch video. The fact that there's a very good reason for this (almost everyone in the UK pays the TV licence fee; nobody outside it does) doesn't stop commenters (and even authors) from whining about it almost every time it's mentioned. (To be fair, the comments on that particular post are pretty smart.)

In fact, over the last week, there's been a nice old flap about the fact that the just-launched iPlayer for iPhone (take that, Hulu!) was (ab)used to allow the download of non-DRMed movies to computers. I'm somewhat surprised at how little attention this got from the (American) Mac blogging community. For example, Ars Technica covered it the day after the Telegraph. The Telegraph, I ask you! (For the latest, Ashley Highfield's blog post is worth a read; apparently 3% of iPlayer viewers are using an iPhone or iPod touch. Impressive.)

To be clear, I don't have much of a problem with the fact that Hulu is US only, or with the fact that iPlayer is UK only; I realise there are commercial pressures and that, although the Internet goes everywhere, products don't. (Just like most geeks, I wish they did, but I also wish that I could eat chocolate cake every meal without getting fat, but that's not going to happen either.*) My problem is with people assuming that, just because something is available to them, it's available to everyone they care about.

Mind you, I did have a bit of a think about the issue of region locking this week. Firstly, a commenter on a picture of Hulu said that censorship sucks, but then, I don't see it as censorship. Secondly, I read a post about the increasing filtering of YouTube videos by geolocation. It mentions that taking YouTube down tends to get noticed (part of the Cute Cat theory- if you haven't read that writeup of a talk from Etech, you really should), so countries are now asking Google to filter particular videos for their countries, and it seems as if, faced with a ban on one hand or allowing censorship on the other, Google are sometimes doing as those regimes want.

Notice that I'm happy to call what YouTube are doing censorship. What's the difference, then? I think it's the fact that YouTube was built as a global video site; anyone could see anything. Specifically blocking particular videos for a particular location, at a government's request, is out of the ordinary, and "censorship" feels right. (Studios taking down a video for everyone is on the line; I can see how it gets called that, but I wouldn't use the term myself.) iPlayer and Hulu, on the other hand, have never pretended to offer their services outside a particular location,** so it's more of a commercial decision; call it "region locking", or "geographic filtering", perhaps. I was glad to be able to find a self-consistent position. Isn't that what being a detail-obsessed nerd is all about?

* Except breakfast. That would just be wrong.
** Well, both allow a certain amount of browsing; it's difficult to choose between that and just locking the entire site away.
*** Remind me to rant about how much better than Twitter Jaiku is sometime, and how utterly unfair it is that it's called a "Twitter clone" when it launched, with more functionality, months earlier. Why didn't anyone use it? Because it came from Finland, a place that's not only not the US, but where they don't even speak English as a native language. Of course nobody had heard of it.