WordPress 3.0.2
WordPress 3.0.2 is available and is a mandatory security update for all previous WordPress versions. Haiku has become traditional:
Fixed on day zero
One-click update makes you safe
This used to be hard
This maintenance release fixes a moderate security issue that could allow a malicious Author-level user to gain further access to the site, addresses a handful of bugs, and provides some additional security enhancements. Big thanks to Vladimir Kolesnikov for detailed and responsible disclosure of the security issue!
Download 3.0.2 or update automatically from the Dashboard > Updates menu in your site’s admin area. You should update immediately even if you do not have untrusted users.
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WordPress for iPhone/iPad v2.6 Released
Attention Apple-gadget-owning WordPress users! Have you been using the WordPress iOS app for iPhone and iPad? Or maybe you tried it a while back and thought it wasn’t for you? Either way, the new release — v2.6 — will knock your socks off. Why? A bunch of reasons:
- Video. Record, upload, attach, and play videos within the app. Yay for being able to catch your friends’ and co-workers’ most
embarrassing shenaniganscreative moments with iPhone video and publish them immediately for all the world to see on your WordPress site. - A total rewrite of the way local drafts are handled, to prevent the unintentional loss of your pending posts.
- Autosave/post revisions. Bam! One of the “oh, thank goodness” features of the web app makes it into the iOS version.
- Easier setup. Faster and easier process for adding your sites to the app.
- Media Library. We’re gradually getting closer to the media management you’re used to in the web app.
There are also numerous bugfixes and performance enhancements in this release, so if you haven’t been using the app lately, you should consider giving it another try. I’m personally pretty excited to start using the iPhone version more often now that there are all these fixes and new features. Especially the video upload. You know, for those creative moments that make life fun.
You can read the full 2.6 release post on the WordPress for iOS blog, and can download v2.6 from iTunes/the app store. Happy mobile blogging!
* * *
Not an iPhone user? We’ve still got your on-the-go back! Check out the WordPress apps for Android, Blackberry, and Nokia (beta). They’re all 100% GPL, of course, and we’re always looking for contributors to the development projects, so check the blogs if you have mobile dev skills and want to get involved.
Tags: apps - Cloud Hosting - Coding Web 3.0 - development - download - features - full - HD Video - Hi-Def Multimedia (HD) - HTML 5 - manage - management - Media - mobile - Multimedia and Video Platforms - Multimedia News - Music on The Web - ogg - Online Marketing - Open Source Software (OSS) - performance - site - The Bleeding Edge of Tech - The Blog Roll - upload - video - VlogRead More...
Why Percentage-Based Designs Don’t Work in Every Browser

Here’s a rule any web designer can live by: Your designs don’t need to look exactly the same in every browser, they just need to look good in every browser.
It’s a maxim that will spare you many a hair-pulling hour. That said, there some things you would expect to be the same across browsers that aren’t. One such problem that’s likely to crop up more often as designers jump on the responsive, flexible-width bandwagon is percentage-width CSS rules.
According to the spec, browsers, given a percentage width, would simply render the width of the page based on the size of the container element. And, in fact, that’s what browsers do, but how they do it varies quite a bit. As a result, percentage-based widths are often displayed quite differently across web browsers.
Developer Steffan Williams recently ran into this problem when trying to create a percentage-based version of his Gridinator CSS framework. Williams created a container
with a width of 940 pixels and then wanted to create a 12 column grid within that container. Do the math and you end up with columns set to a width of 6.38298 percent.
Pull that up in Firefox or Internet Explorer 6/7 and you’ll see what you expect to see. In Safari, Chrome and Opera, however, you’ll see something different. IE 8 and 9 are also slightly off.
The problem is not a new one; developer John Resig pointed this out years ago. But as Williams notes, it’s odd that browser behavior when rendering percentage-width grids is still so inconsistent across vendors, especially given how much today’s browsers tout their CSS 3 support.
The problem isn’t necessarily a simple case of Firefox and IE being right and the others wrong. As Opera CTO and CSS creator Håkon Wium Lie tells Webmonkey, the problem is “the CSS specification does not require a certain level of precision for floating point numbers.”
This means browsers are free to round your carefully computed percentages up or down as they see fit. According to Lie, Opera considers the result of Williams’ experiment to be a bug. Same with the WebKit project, the engine that handles rendering in both Safari and Chrome, though in Webkit’s case the bug has been unassigned since 2006. But really, there is no right or wrong here, just different ways of rounding.
Fortunately, for most of your stylesheets, the differences in each browsers’ floating point precision will not result in visible differences on the screens of various devices. However, as Williams’ experiment shows, it’s easy to write a page where those very small differences in rounding become visible when compounded — like a grid-based layout.
What irks Williams and others is that these problems are old and well-known, and yet most browser vendors have still made no move to fix them. Instead, they focus on supporting the shiny new features in CSS 3.
We certainly wouldn’t want to suggest that browsers should stop innovating and supporting the latest and greatest standards-based tools, but sometimes it’s worth postponing playtime with the newest toys to make sure the foundations are solid. In this case, Opera, Safari and Chrome have some cracks showing, and it’s high time they fix them.
Until they do, we suggest you learn to live with the slightly different rendering behaviors in those browsers. After all, pixel-perfect cross-browser support is never going to happen. Given that the web of the future will have even more mobile phones, tablets, and small screen laptops, responsive designs and fluid grids are a trend we expect to grow.
There are also some workarounds. For example, you can use ems instead of percentages, which render much more consistently across browsers. Opera’s Lie also points out that the CSS Working Group has several specifications in draft to address the need for grid-based design, including multi-column text and the CSS Template Layout Module, though neither are widely supported at the moment.
iPad photo by Jim Merithew/Wired
See Also:
- Make a Big Splash on Tiny Screens With Media Queries
- Slide Show Time: Rethinking the Mobile Webhttp://www.webmonkey.com/2010/09/slide-show-time-rethinking-the-mobile-web/
- A Guide to Internet Explorer 9’s HTML5/CSS 3 Support
Read More...
Chrome Browser to Start Sandboxing Flash Player
The latest developer channel release of the Chrome browser now supports sandboxing for Adobe’s Flash Player on Windows 7, Vista and XP.
This feature should provide extra protection against malicious browser exploits through the Flash Player. The dev channel releases of Chrome on Windows already support sandboxing for HTML rendering and JavaScript execution, two of the most common paths people can use to run malicious code on an unsuspecting user’s machine. Sandboxing keeps these sensitive parts of the browser more secure while still allowing web pages and apps to access the other, less-sensitive parts of the browser.
Windows users on the dev channel should see the update arrive automatically. We should note that the sandbox does have some bugs and may break other parts of the browser — this is a developer release, after all. Once the kinks are ironed out, all of these sandboxing features will begin making their way into proper stable Chrome releases.
Google’s Chromium team has been working with Adobe to build better Flash controls into Chrome, and to utilize Chrome’s sandboxing technology for the plug-in. Google says Wednesday’s update makes Chrome the only browser on XP that sandboxes Flash. For more about sandboxing and how Chrome is implementing it, read the overview post on the Chromium blog from October. Also, Wednesday’s release comes less than a month after Chrome introduced click-to-play controls for Flash and other plug-ins.
Adobe’s Flash Player is the most widely-used browser plug-in on the web, and it’s the dominant choice for video playback and games online. Even so, the technology gets beat up for performance issues and its security shortcomings, and it’s still falling out of favor among standards enthusiasts who are pushing HTML5 as the better solution for displaying multimedia in the browser.
Adobe also released a new beta version of the Flash Player on Wednesday that improves some of its performance issues.
See also:
- New Flash Player 10.2 Goes Easy on the CPU
- Chrome Now Offers Click-to-Play Option for Flash, Other Plugins
- Chrome 7 Arrives With Bug Fixes, Better HTML5 Support
Read More...
Can WAI-ARIA Build a More Accessible Web?
Accessibility in web design has come a long way since the days of table-based layouts with single-pixel .gif spacers. But even current best practices are far from perfect.
Today, we’ll tell you a bit more about these accessibility troubles as they relate to dynamic web apps — fitting, as today is Blue Beanie Day. For four years now, design guru Jeffrey Zeldman has encouraged web authors to wear a blue beanie on November 30 to show their support for web standards. Also, you’re encouraged to take a picture of yourself wearing a blue beanie and upload it to a Flickr pool. So, with standards quite literally on the brain, we’ll tackle the topic of rich web apps.
One of the coolest things about web apps is that elements refresh inside the browser without reloading the page. But most screen readers used by those with disabilities can’t parse these changes, so users who rely on them will remain unaware of any dynamically refreshed elements on the page. That’s just one of the many problems that WAI-ARIA, an emerging specification for Accessible Rich Internet Applications from the W3C, is hoping to solve.
At its core, WAI-ARIA is a means of annotating page elements with the roles, properties, and states that define exactly what those elements do. Take a navigation element as a simple example. In HTML5 we might do something like this:
<nav>
<ul>
<li>Home
<li><a href="/about/">About</a></li>
...etc...
</ul>
</nav>
While it might seem that the
tag would defining the nav element’s “role,” not every browser will understand it (just because the browser can display it, does not mean it understands the tag). Also, the purpose of a navigation element may be obvious to most users, but to a screen reader being used by somebody who can’t see, the navigation strip could be just a jumble of words. Leveraging WAI-ARIA’s syntax, we can double up to ensure screen readers will know that this chunk of code is navigation:
<nav role="navigation">
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li><a href="/about/">About</a></li>
...etc...
</ul>
</nav>
The
attribute is what’s known as a landmark role and is designed to let non-visual browsers know where they are.
It seems simple, and indeed when the spec is finished and fully supported by all the major screen readers, WAI-ARIA promises to make the web more accessible without overly complicating your markup. Unfortunately, there are numerous problems with WAI-ARIA at the moment, which make support uneven and can be confusing for web authors trying to do the right thing.
Our friends at A List Apart recently waded into the confusion and uneven support with two great posts on WAI-ARIA and how you can use it (and not use it) on your sites. The first article, The Accessibility of WAI-ARIA, dives into what WAI-ARIA is, what it’s trying to do, and why it’s not yet a panacea.
The second piece is more hands-on. ARIA and Progressive Enhancement looks at how ARIA fits within the progressive enhancement approach to web design. That is, when starting with valid HTML and enhancing it with CSS and JavaScript, how can you also work the WAI-ARIA attributes into your code?
The ARIA and Progressive Enhancement article also has a very informative table listing the varying levels of support in the latest versions of popular screen readers. Unfortunately, one of the main problems with WAI-ARIA today is that there’s no way to know the level of support a user agent has. Unlike CSS or JavaScript, there’s no reliable way to test which features a user agent supports (if any).
As Derek Featherstone writes in his ALA piece:
The problem that we have right now is that ARIA is an all or nothing deal. And writing scripts that respect both an ARIA supported methodology and a non-ARIA methodology is going to be incredibly difficult, because we have no reliable way of knowing the status of a user agent’s support for ARIA—it depends on something we can’t detect: the right combination of browser, assistive technology, and full ARIA implementation.
For more information on the various levels of support in screen readers and web browsers, have a look at Accessible Culture’s article, HTML5 plus ARIA “Sanity Check.” The post highlights some of the bugs, pitfalls and gotchas in current screen readers, as well as some workarounds and other non-ARIA solutions.
As Detlev Fischer writes in the first of the two ALA articles, “as long as older screen reader/browser combinations incapable of interpreting WAI-ARIA still constitute a significant part of the installed base, web designers who care for accessibility should use WAI-ARIA markup only to enrich their sites.”
In other words, use WAI-ARIA, but don’t rely on it. Make sure you have fallbacks in place until the spec is finalized and browser/reader support more widespread.
Unicorn photo from Wikimedia Commons/CC
See Also:
- Microdata: HTML5’s Best-Kept Secret
- W3C’s Unicorn Validator Checks Multiple Standards at Once
- Using Microformats in HTML5
- Add Semantic Value to Your Pages With HTML 5
Read More...
Billboard Web Design: How to Win Your Audience’s Attention
Let’s say you’re driving down the freeway at 65mph and you see the roadside plastered with advertising posters on both sides. Some small, some large, all meant in some measure to cause you to remember a brand or identity, to keep that company name in your mind. The more saturated the roadside becomes with advertisements, the more the brand has to be distinctively creative, unique and memorable.
Generally, the eye-catching ads are mostly the ones with witty taglines that are easy and fun to remember. As much as the colors of the images and fonts being used are important to make it easy on the eyes, the idea actually has to be unique and simple enough to be separated from other commercials.

Photo credit: Randy Harris
The same principle applies to any website. Though a user won’t necessarily be passing by your site at 65 mph, there is a certain bounce rate — visitors who leave your site shortly after entering it. For many websites, these rates are much too high. This poses a very similar challenge to those who design billboards. You have a very short amount of time to capture your audience’s attention and to keep it for long. With that in mind, here are some principles for developing billboard-style Web designs.
Creative and Unique
An important piece to the billboard website puzzle is creative and unique design. This can be intertwined within the other principles, and when done effectively, can be the sole reason for viewers to dig deeper into your site.
Hey Indy
Creative and fun, heyindy.com breaks the mold of an ordinary, plain and boring website. Complete with customized illustrations, drawings and playful typography, each page engages users, making them feel comfortable on the site. Notice how well the illustration on the top fits with the tagline of the site. Hey Indy creates websites, illustrations and animations and uses the “mixtape” metaphor to attract client’s attention. The site is not obtrusive, but inviting instead. A very personal, attractive design.
Dropr
This online service uses a nice typographic poster with playful typography on the front page to explain what it does. The design is attractive and inviting, although a plain simple text message could have worked just as well to deliver the message to the visitors. The interesting part are the animated clouds on the left side with colorful water drops. Very nice use of metaphor contained in the title of the service. An original and unique design.
TVLCORPs
Interested yet? Though the tagline shown on the web design below does not really say what this company does, the layout is creative and compelling; the strong, vivid contrast is more than enough to turn some heads. Notice how “UX/UI” stands out on the site, focusing the visitor’s attention on the ‘services’ section of the page.
{ ro:newmedia }
Sometimes it’s a good idea to risk an unusual design approach — be it exaggerated typography, striking color combinations or unusual design layouts. The latter is the case in point for ro:newmedia’s website. The layout is very unusual and original, and therefore memorable. Colorful large spinning circles look like an overlay of the site layout and appear vividly against the dark background. A downside: the font size of the text on the page could be a bit larger.
Pixelmator
Much different than the standard, pasted screenshot, Pixelmator works the sleek, elegant interface of their application directly into the design of their page.
Relogik
What makes this particular site effective is its ability to draw the eye to the name of the product or service they are showcasing. In this case, it works well to give the company name an afterthought as well as making the product more prominent.
Made My Day
One more test to run is to assume how much impact a particular site has on a reader, if they were to take a quick glance and look away. Ask yourself: If you were to carry out your day from that point, what were you to still remember about that particular site? The large orange circle elegantly integrated into this composition does an excellent job of leaving a style for returning visitors to remember.
Compelling Headlines
A good design only goes as far as the content it contains. For this reason, it’s vital to go beyond average with your copy text. If you’ve seen a billboard advertisement or two, you may remember the tag lines featured on them. Short and to the point, they’re meant to get you to remember a certain brand.
Many large corporations don’t even use ad copy, but rely solely on their logo and identity to remain effective. One has even gone as far as making their billboard a working sundial in this respect. Though we should all aspire to having a brand of our own this influential, it’s recommended that you stick to clear and powerful copy text along with your design to help capture your readers. Here are some examples of compelling headlines:
Ryan & Sofia
Ryan and Sofia combine hand-drawn design elements with a compelling headline, all supported by a very informal, emotional language and choice of layout. The message is strong and clear, and therefore very appealing.
Comwerks Interactive
This design agency uses a clear and simple language to communicate the purpose of the website. Cute illustrations make a website look less formal and much more engaging. The purpose is clear and the client list immediately proves that the design agency indeed builds cool stuff. A downside: the text on the images in the slideshow would benefit from not being embedded in the images.
Camera+
Clear, contrasting colors only add to the effectiveness of the headline given on this website. In a clear and elegant manner, a reader is quickly able to glance at this website and know its purpose.
Just Dot
Sticking to the billboard clarity, Just Dot provides a clever design and tagline to attract readers. Along with a creative chalkboard theme, this site features neat and clean navigation to help guide readers through the site.
Jeroen Homan
In clear and impacting typography, this site screams out its purpose distinctly. In today’s fast-lane crowd of web-surfers, such clear and impacting titles are a must-have for a captivating and inviting website. This of course, is the case as long as the amount of content allows for this.
DBA Products
An important part of capturing your reader’s attention is in engaging in a conversation. When one reads, “Think before you write” a first reaction is to wonder about what is actually meant by that phrase. Firstly, attention is captured. Secondly, a reader eye is lead to the bottom left corner where they can view a video to learn more.
Clever and Poignant
Not every billboard is meant to be humorous, however, almost all strive in some way to get a point across in a not-so-ordinary fashion. Consider the last few advertisements you’ve seen. If they were selling toothpaste, did the ad simply state “Buy this Toothpaste” or was there something creative and direct to get you to remember that particular brand?
In Web design, the same principle can be applied. With the hundreds, if not thousands, of websites we’re exposed to overall, trends can be seen which are all too often followed. But because the Web is ever changing, simply following trends can lead to a site becoming outdated the moment it’s published.
How can this be avoided? Once again, we can look back at billboard advertisements. What makes many of them effective is their ability to deliver something creative, or other than what the average person was expecting to see.
Tea Round
Complete with high-quality images, Tea Round’s website captures attention, while incorporating a creative tagline.
Spring: Supporting Biodiversity
This particular tagline is effective because it engages you with a question. Notice how the question is not “Do you support biodiversity?” but rather “What will you do to support biodiversity?” which places the reader in a position to feel as though they need to take action!
Tapbots
Another element to creating memorable billboard-style web designs, is the product or service itself. Short and snappy names are just as, if not more important, than the tagline. “Calcbot” is much easier to say and much more memorable than something like “Calculator Application for iPhone.”
Pointy
Featuring a vibrant color scheme and typestyle, Pointy successfully merges creative typography with a compelling and challenging headline. Along with the headline is a clear next action for the reader to take: “Let’s talk”.
Powerfully Branded
Though it’s already been touched a bit thus far, branding is another important piece to powerful Web design which deserves further attention. As with the toothpaste example, a billboard’s purpose may in the end be to generate sales, but just as important is the building of the brand the company is advertising. After all, you can get dozens of different brands of toothpaste, just as there are a multitude of of websites out there, so how is one among the crowd to be remembered? Building a brand through a Web design is the very mark or entity visitors remember you by.
Nike®
Showing the importance of subtle repetition, Nike® combines a creative display of their shoes, while giving viewers multiple views of their logo.
McCafé®
With every cup featuring the McDonald’s® and McCafé® logo, a viewer can be grabbed by the quality of the product, while remembering the brand correlating to it.
Coca-Cola®
The Coca-Cola® website is a billboard in action. Complete with the clean logo and bottle, with the clear and simple tagline, the brand is very easy to remember.
What Does a Brand Have to do with a Website Anyway?
Even if the website you’re developing doesn’t have the sole purpose of making money, a brand is still very important. Brands are essential for goading visitors to come back time and time again. Consider some of the recent advertisements you’ve seen. If there is a company you know and love, would you say you’re much more apt to spend time looking at that advertisement, as oppose to the dozens of others you’ve never seen before, or the ones that don’t interest you? The same applies for websites.
Eye-catching, yet tactful
There are countless sites on the web that will undoubtedly catch your attention, but only for the worse. Poor, outdated design, or a heap of flashing animated gifs will only increase your bounce-rate. Appealing sites achieve a balance between capturing reader’s attention and providing an adequate amount of useful information. Something to keep in mind: the design is a key piece of your website, but if it distracts away from the aimed content, it no longer serves its purpose!
Megumi
With jaw-dropping elegance and simplicity, this web design effectively brands their name, gives a brief tour, all while keeping the design clean and clear.
MailChimp
MailChimp’s website design is bold and clean, and it sticks to a consistent color scheme. Bright, complimenting colors are used while making the main content readable.
Row to the Pole
Still retaining a subdued and clean typestyle and color scheme, this site is still able to feature a commanding headline. Communication, clarity, and balanced design are all utilized exceptionally on this layout.
Clean, Simple and Straight to the point
Of course, one of the options is also as simple as simplicity. Not to say we cannot be creative in our delivery, but a saturation of text and images, especially on a home page, can motivate our viewers to click that back button! Here we’ll take a look at some good billboard-style websites that have captured the essence of simplicity to attract readers:
Less
Less has a clean and well-designed interface. Complete with a clever tagline, this application shows you a screenshot of exactly what they’re offering to you. It doesn’t get much clearer than this.
Courier Mac App
Complete with a well crafted icon, Courier clearly depicts their application with cool, soft colors, yet elegantly displaying the showcased application. The catchy subtitle also assists with remembering the name. Something to take note of as well is the fact that the “download” and “purchase” buttons are clearly displayed at the top of the page.
We Are Omazing
With a simplistic approach, this site integrates the imagery and style into the tagline. Branding is in effect as a memorable name is complimented with readable design.
Clarity and Contrast
Pivotal to any design, good contrast is a must. While subtle typefaces and graphics have their place in design, strong contrast is important to quickly direct a reader’s attention or get them to remember something particular. If viewers have to hunt around for what you do or what you offer – more than likely they will not stick around for long. Make it easy for your readers to know what you’re about from the very beginning.
Charles Elena
Don’t be afraid to go big with your text. This site sports an effectively large Sans-Serif font to grab the attention of its readers and to get them to remember what they do. The design isn’t necessarily strong and vivid, but the message is communicated very clearly.
Live Books
There are many different features listed on Live Book’s website, but one thing that’s executed exceptionally well is its clarity. There’s no mystery here, you know exactly what they offer.
Conclusion
In an age where advertisements saturate our market, it becomes all the more visible of the need for creative and effective design. As we’ve explored here, good design goes beyond making things look nice, or following trends, but rather effectively capturing the audience of those whom we wish to view the site. In the end, what action viewers do, or do not take, can come down to the finest details of the decisions made by the Web developer.
Feel free to share your opinions or experiences in the comment section below!
Bonus Billboard Template Download
In addition to the concepts explored here, you can download your free billboard website/image template for displaying your billboard-style design. Place any 440px wide image into the code provided, or modify it yourself for a great way to display your images. See some samples below:



Download the template for free
- download the PSD template (20 Mb, .zip)
- download HTML with CSS (+ a Web ready version of the billboard image)
(ik) (vf)
© Thomas McGee for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | Post a comment | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: advertisement, audience, billboard, commercial, showcases, tagline
Tags: advertising - Cloud - Cloud Hosting - Coding Web 3.0 - company - complete - delivery - design - download - features - flash - full - GUI - HD Video - Hi-Def Multimedia (HD) - high - HTML 5 - images - Media - Multimedia and Video Platforms - Multimedia News - Music on The Web - online - Online Marketing - Open Source Software (OSS) - options - photo - service - site - The Bleeding Edge of Tech - The Blog Roll - video - Vlog - website
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Developers like iPhone, but here comes Android
The iPhone is still the most popular mobile platform among app developers, though interest in Android is revving up, says a new study from Millennial Media.
Originally posted at News – Wireless
Tags: Cloud Hosting - Coding Web 3.0 - HD Video - Hi-Def Multimedia (HD) - HTML 5 - Media - mobile - Multimedia and Video Platforms - Multimedia News - Music on The Web - Online Marketing - Open Source Software (OSS) - platform - The Bleeding Edge of Tech - The Blog Roll - VlogRead More...
Hulu Plus Opens to All, No Invite Needed
Hulu Plus, the premium version of online video hub Hulu, has now opened its doors to all interested users, according to a post this morning on the company’s corporate blog.
Says Rob Wong, Director of Product for Hulu, users no longer need an invitation to sign up for Hulu Plus. Also, the service will roll out next week to Sony PS3 owners with a PlayStation network account.
Hulu Plus is paid version of the popular TV and movie streaming service Hulu, which initially arrived in June of this year as an iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch application. Subscribers pay $9.99 for access to full seasons of TV shows on Hulu, instead of the the handful of episodes the free version offers.
The premium service also supports some Internet-enabled TVs and Blu-Ray players, media center boxes like Roku, as well as gaming consoles like the Xbox 360 and the PS3, as noted above. Support for Sony BRAVIA 2010 TVs was just announced today, too.
The blog post mentions Hulu Plus’s expanding lineup of shows, including the addition of fall TV shows like The Event, Raising Hope and No Ordinary Family. Hulu is also delivering the back episodes of dramas like Monk, Psych and Battlestar Galatica, it says.
That said, industry insiders know Hulu has its struggles – it still doesn’t offer CBS or CW content, for example, and in March, Viacom pulled two of Hulu’s most popular offerings – The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report – after it realized these money makers should be making it money, not Hulu.
Worth Cutting Cable For?
However, for those looking to cut out their cable bills, $9.99/month isn’t too bad, as long as you’re not concerned with having all that cable TV has to offer. A combination of a digital converter box for capturing over-the-air transmissions of DTV signals and Hulu Plus may be “good enough” for penny-pinchers, though.
On a personal note, as someone who just spent well over a hundred dollars buying back episodes of Battlestar Galatica on iTunes prior to Hulu Plus’s launch (ouch!), this service would have been a welcome, much more affordable way to watch an entire show from episode one. My timing was awful. And if that’s the sort of TV-viewing you’re up for too, Hulu Plus is worth consideration.
If, however, $9.99/month still seems too high, then wait – it could still change. Hulu Plus represents one of the first major experiments in alternatives to cable TV (Netflix streaming being another, of course.) It’s fair to say the company is testing the waters and adjusting to meet demand – or lack thereof. Finding the pricing “sweet spot” is undoubtedly of the utmost importance to Hulu.
Tags: Cloud Hosting - Coding Web 3.0 - company - full - HD Video - Hi-Def Multimedia (HD) - high - HTML 5 - Media - Multimedia and Video Platforms - Multimedia News - Music on The Web - online - Online Marketing - Open - Open Source Software (OSS) - owner - service - The Bleeding Edge of Tech - The Blog Roll - video - VlogRead More...
HoodieBuddie Launches with Only Online Video Ads, and Succeeds!
This is an interesting and strange group that came together on a recent case study. YuMe, ScanScout and BBE (recently purchased by Specific Media) combined their online video ad reach to help launch a new product. The product, HoodieBuddie, is being marketed only using in-stream video advertising. How’s that for a bold and innovative move?Back [...]
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ReelSEO’s Online Video Happenings – Fall 2010 Podcast
ReelSEO’s Grant Crowell and Mark Robertson spliff in our podcast shue about our amazing video coverage, including: YouTube’s Promoted Videos improvements, speaking on Video SEO at the Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago, our upcoming coverage of the Streaming Media West conference, Facebook video marketing tactics, and interviews at the Blogworld New Media Expo. Did [...]
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