Sony’s Eric Lempel says he doesn’t know why the streaming video service Hulu is blocking the PlayStation 3 browser, but that Sony will probably look into it someday if it has some free time.
It was reported in late June that PlayStation 3 owners could no longer access Hulu, a service that streams television programs and movies to viewers in the U.S. The sudden stoppage wasn’t explained but some testing quickly showed that the PlayStation 3 was in fact being specifically blocked. In an interview with PC World, Lempel, Sony’s director of network operations, acknowledged the problem but didn’t seem overly enthusiastic about actually pursuing it.
“We’ve tested it out here, and it does seem you can’t access Hulu. You can access the site, but when you go to play a video, you get an error message,” he said. “We’re not quite sure why that is. If I speculate I might guess it’s because they refined their list of supported browsers and we were a victim, or maybe they’re intentionally blocking the PS3, but right now it doesn’t work, and you’d really have to talk to Hulu about why that is.”
“[The Hulu block] is something we’ll probably look into, but at the same time, our browser’s there to let our users do what they want and browse wherever they want, and we can’t always chase down all these sites and say hey, how come it’s not working today?” he continued. “The browser’s built on unique code, so it’s not like any of the other browsers out there, and there are some things that are just incompatible.”
Which doesn’t do much to explain why the service was working fine one day and became completely non-functional the next, but Lempel suggested users should focus on what does work rather than worrying about what doesn’t. “We have an open browser, there’s a ton of sites that do work, and it’s compatible with other video streaming sites like YouTube and music streaming sites,” he said. “But it’s true, Hulu’s not working right now and I’m not really sure why.”
