And also, Veoh no longer works in the PS3 browser

By Joe Fourhman | July 12, 2009

At the end of June, PS3 owners discovered they could no longer watch videos on Hulu.com. A few days ago, I found my PS3 could also no longer watch videos on Veoh.com, and that the Adult Swim video player is now a little sketchy. Whereas before June, all three services worked ultra-fine.

As has been well reported, if you take your PS3 web browser to Hulu, you get an error message stating “This video is not available on your platform.” This has led many to believe that Hulu is specifically blocking PS3s. Similarly, if you try to watch a video on Veoh, the entire video playing area just vanishes… almost like a 1996-era HTML tables error. You can browse videos, but once you try to play one, all you get is Veoh’s header and footer.

And as for Adult Swim, now my PS3 always has a 70/30 chance of not continuing to play the show once it hits a commercial. It requires a lot of clicking and re-clicking to get the stream to continue. YouTube vids continue to play, but damned if the audio doesn’t seem a little out-of-sync for me tonight.

As I said, this all used to work great – last summer my wife and I enjoyed the entirety of Korean drama “Coffee Prince” on Veoh, and as of a few weeks ago I was watching complete unmolested episodes of “The Mighty Boosh” on Adult Swim – so what’s going on here? Do we blame a Sony firmware update, the lack of a Sony firmware update, or is actually there a conspiracy afoot to block the PS3 browser? The confluence of events makes me think there’s a simple browser code issue to resolve, but I’ll be the first to admit that I know nothing about browser compatibilities.