Oh, you can totally automate that kind of thing - it's just a lot harder than being able to predict.
Like, because Hulu deals with a comparatively small set of videos that are uploaded by staff rather than end users, they don't need to build as much. If there is a workflow that must be followed to upload the videos, that's fine. It's a lot easier to develop for internal use than for end-users.
Likewise, with 100 videos a week Hulu could have one of their programmers manually deal with a lot of stuff that YouTube couldn't since having a person sort through or run a process on their millions of videos just isn't the same.
It's just an easier task. Yeah, clearly YouTube is possible, but it's hard. You have to store a lot more data, you don't have staff entering in nice meta-data and making sure they're aren't dupes, you don't have the option of telling a user, "encode this on your computer and then SFTP it to here", you have a ton more videos, you don't know what's popular.
It's a lot more software to write. It's what I find so impressive about YouTube. Hulu is nice, but it isn't that impressive. With the little amount of data they're storing it's easy to design databases and file storage systems that will accommodate that and there are challenges pushing that much data over a pipe as it's a popular site, but nothing like YouTube's challenges.
Look at it this way, YouTube has over 65,000 videos uploaded every single day! And that's from way back in 2006! YouTube has increased its presence since then. That's huge. Everything has to just work. Hulu gets what? 10 videos a day and they have several fulltime staff? Heck, they could do most things manually. Something is a little glitchy, they can just deal with it manually.
Like, because Hulu deals with a comparatively small set of videos that are uploaded by staff rather than end users, they don't need to build as much. If there is a workflow that must be followed to upload the videos, that's fine. It's a lot easier to develop for internal use than for end-users.
Likewise, with 100 videos a week Hulu could have one of their programmers manually deal with a lot of stuff that YouTube couldn't since having a person sort through or run a process on their millions of videos just isn't the same.
It's just an easier task. Yeah, clearly YouTube is possible, but it's hard. You have to store a lot more data, you don't have staff entering in nice meta-data and making sure they're aren't dupes, you don't have the option of telling a user, "encode this on your computer and then SFTP it to here", you have a ton more videos, you don't know what's popular.
It's a lot more software to write. It's what I find so impressive about YouTube. Hulu is nice, but it isn't that impressive. With the little amount of data they're storing it's easy to design databases and file storage systems that will accommodate that and there are challenges pushing that much data over a pipe as it's a popular site, but nothing like YouTube's challenges.
Look at it this way, YouTube has over 65,000 videos uploaded every single day! And that's from way back in 2006! YouTube has increased its presence since then. That's huge. Everything has to just work. Hulu gets what? 10 videos a day and they have several fulltime staff? Heck, they could do most things manually. Something is a little glitchy, they can just deal with it manually.