Comments about Hulu

Well, every time there's any sort of article / press release / etc about Hulu, there are always a boatload of people squawking about how they can't watch it in their non-U.S. country and how Hulu is a bunch of evil bastards who don't think that anybody outside of the U.S. even matters and it's all so damn inconsiderate of them to block stuff. Well, if you've read ramblings about distribution contracts and such, then you know that the true reason is that those distribution contracts I talked about only apply to the country in which they're made, and Hulu was created by two media companies who have distribution contracts in the U.S. (and not outside of it). One comment I recently read on one of these bitch sessions:

I love how every article about problems in the USA is flooded by a horde of foreigners claiming how glad they are proud to live in whatever country they are from. But when we have something minor and stupid like hulu they start clamoring about how they have some right to access it.

We have to put up with all the crap here, let us be able to stream old episodes of Airwolf in peace

That having been said, the amount of work required to make Hulu functional outside of the U.S. would not be insurmountable. Without divulging anything that could even be considered proprietary, let me just say that Hulu restricts playback based on the location as determined by your IP address. Some foreigners circumvent that by finding an available U.S.-based proxy and piping Hulu through that, although that sucks up the proxy's bandwidth pretty darn quick. At any rate, the problem isn't so much the technical aspect, but rather that each different country would require:
1) Checking to make sure that the piece of content was licensed to be played in that country
2) Determining who was the licensed distributor for that country (i.e. who gets paid when we roll an ad)
3) Making an ad call specifically for that region (i.e. an ad in the local language etc).

Of course, there are also other problems, such as audio tracks - programming in most countries is dubbed as opposed to subtitled - there are exceptions of course (for example, if memory serves correctly, most content is subtitled in the Netherlands, whereas almost all content is dubbed in Spain), but that means that you have to, at the very least, have a corresponding CC file for the local language, and more likely you need to have an audio track in the local language. This is assuming, of course, that you're determined to use the same video file for all locales, as opposed to just having multiple copies with different languages.
What I'm getting at is that there's more to it than might be apparent at first blush, but it's not impossible. I think that if Hulu wanted to bring their content to a new market (say, for instance, GERMANY), then their best strategy would be to simply create a German version of the site, more or less from scratch. I know it can be done, and probably in a matter of a few months! Of course, that's only addressing the technical hurdles - I think that the business side of it would be the really difficult part.
I'm also completely ignoring the distribution partner aspects (did you know that Hulu content is available on AOL, Yahoo, MSN Video, Fancast, and MySpace video?), which have helped drive traffic to Hulu - even after it seemed like everybody and their brother on the Internet knew about Hulu, I still only had about a 25% success rate when I talked about it in meatspace.
At any rate, speaking as an expat, I didn't really appreciate all of the instant gratification services available for my entertainment on the Internets until they were gone. Hulu truly is fantastic, as is the Netflix instant viewing. I can only hope that markets in other countries start following suit.