finishingmycoffee.com

Fox Removes "Always Sunny" From Hulu

Fox to fans: "I'll eat your babies, bitch!"

After a brilliant musical finale to Season 3, Fox, in their infinite wisdom, has said screw you to the die hard fans who have supported Always Sunny and have ordered all three seasons removed from Hulu.

This is a show that got it's start when  its stars/creators filmed a pilot with their home camera (for the cost of the videotapes) and got them to the head of fledgling cable network FX, who took a chance on the young comedic-genuses.

Hulu originally took the videos down asap and without warning to users. Below is their apology. Still, however, they say nothing about why Fox removed the show.

Can't Fox just say "we want to force fans to overpay for dvds" and be done with it? I'd even be fine with this policy if I thought The Gang was getting a big slice of the pie (as Frank would say) ... but I'm pretty sure that any extra coin is headed straight to the pockets of Fox execs. Bastards.

Hulu's apology:

Customer trust is hard won, easily lost.

On January 9, we removed nearly 3 seasons of full episodes of ''It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.'' We did this at the request of the content owner. Despite Hulu's opinion and position on such content removals (which we share liberally with all of our content partners), these things do happen and will continue to happen on the Hulu service with regards to some television series. As power users of Hulu have seen, we've added a large amount of content to the library each month, and every once in a while we are required to remove some content as well.

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. We have re-posted all of the episodes in the interest of giving people advance notice before the episodes will be taken down two weeks from today. The episodes will be taken down on January 25, 2009.

Via Hulu - It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

[Update: Saw a commercial during the Battlestar Galactica "season" premiere tonight -- Always Sunny has been moved to FanCast, where recent episodes will be available. Sadly, FanCast currently does not recognize Google's Chrome browser and gives an "out of date browser" error.]