Archive for the ‘Hulu’ Category

Technology and Me – 2001 through 2010

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

This is the first of 3 posts that have to do with technology changes over the last decade. I’ve been thinking about this since January but finally got around to writing it down this weekend. We’ll start with the basics – what I was using in 2001 and what I’m using in 2010.

Technology I used in 2001:
- Nokia cellphone for mobile and long-distance calls
- landline for local calls and Internet access
- dial-up Internet access
- company provided laptop with Windows NT 4 for getting online at home
- basic cable
- standard definition 20″ TV
- cheap battery-powered alarm clock
Technology I’m using in 2010:
- iPhone 3GS for all calls, MP3 player, Pandora, yellow pages, maps, mobile web access, gaming, e-mail (personal and work), controlling my Apple TV, alarm clock, calendar, and contacts.
- NOTE: no landline
- cable Internet access with wireless router
- Apple TV
- Mac mini
- 17″ HP laptop with Windows 7 (personal)
- 10″ Dell laptop with Windows XP (work)
- Samsung Internet-connected Blu-Ray player
- 65″ Panasonic Plasma HDTV
- DirecTV with dual tuner HD DVR, NFL Sunday Ticket, and ESPN Game Plan (no premium channels)
- Hulu for catching up on shows that I may have missed
- Netflix for DVDs and streaming video (but I’m unimpressed with their streaming content, so I’ll probably cancel with football season resumes in Fall 2010)
- PS2 used primarily for Karaoke games
- Harmony remote that controls my Sony receiver, Samsung Blu-Ray player, DirecTV DVR, Apple TV, and Panasonic HDTV

Technology I used in 2001:

- Nokia cellphone for mobile and long-distance calls

- landline for local calls and Internet access

- dial-up Internet access

- company provided laptop with Windows NT 4 for work and for getting online at home

- basic cable

- standard definition 20″ TV

- cheap battery-powered alarm clock

Technology I’m using in 2010:

- iPhone 3GS for all calls, MP3 player, Pandora, yellow pages, maps, mobile web access, gaming, e-mail (personal and work), controlling my Apple TV, alarm clock, calendar, and contacts.

- NOTE: no landline

- cable Internet access with wireless router

- Apple TV

- Mac mini

- 17″ HP laptop with Windows 7 (personal)

- 10″ Dell laptop with Windows XP (work)

- Samsung Internet-connected Blu-Ray player

- 65″ Panasonic Plasma HDTV

- DirecTV with dual tuner HD DVR, NFL Sunday Ticket, and ESPN Game Plan (no premium channels)

- Hulu for catching up on shows that I may have missed

- Netflix for DVDs and streaming video (but I’m unimpressed with their streaming content, so I’ll probably cancel when football season resumes in Fall 2010)

- PS2 used primarily for Karaoke games

- Harmony remote that controls my Sony receiver, Samsung Blu-Ray player, DirecTV DVR, Apple TV, and Panasonic HDTV

Posted in Apple, Comcast, DirecTV, Hulu, Microsoft, Randy Weber, TV, TiVo, Windows, cable, e-mail, football, gadgets, iPhone, mobile, personal, reviews, satellite, sports, work | No Comments »

Apple TV, part 3 (Boxee)

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

I hooked up the Apple TV, accessed iTunes on my Mac mini, and synced my music from my mini to the Apple TV.

Next up was installing Boxee. Not quite as easy as the instructions made it out to be, but I still got it installed and working. There was some overscan on the video but the software has a really easy way to adjust the overscan, so no problem.

Boxee Logo

Hulu worked, though it listed videos that weren’t available anymore. That was annoying. ABC.com didn’t work, nor did Fox. That’s makes Boxee a lot less useful. Didn’t try You Tube.

I like the Apple TV’s implementation of Front Row for music much better than I like Boxee. I see Boxee as my avenue to Internet video. For that it works well. I had an episode of 24 running from Hulu. It looked great.

The Apple TV and Boxee are definitely worth it.

Posted in Apple, Hulu, Randy Weber, YouTube, gadgets, personal, reviews, video | No Comments »

Customer Service Excellence

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

It’s OK to make mistakes as long as you admit it, apologize for it, and fix it. This is a great example from Hulu on doing just that found at 37signals:

This note, however, is not about the fact that episodes of ’’It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’’ were taken down. Rather, this note is to communicate to our users that we screwed up royally with regards to how we handled this specific content removal and to apologize for our lack of strong execution. We gave effectively no notice to our users that these ’’Sunny’’ episodes would be coming off the service. We handled this in precisely the opposite way that we should have. We believe that our users deserve the decency of a reasonable warning before content is taken down from the Hulu service. Please accept our apologies.

Given the very reasonable user feedback that we have received on this topic (we read every twitter, email and post), we have just re-posted all of the episodes that we had previously removed. I’d like to point out to our users that the content owner in this case – FX Networks – was very quick to say yes to our request to give users reasonable advance notice here, despite the fact that it was the Hulu team that dropped the ball…

Well done.

Posted in Hulu, Internet biz, customer service, leadership, marketing, pr, video | No Comments »