Hulu’s Dead Embeds: The Perils of Online Streaming

We noticed this week that an embedded version of The Breakfast Club in an early post of ours about Hulu had gone missing. The embed (see screenshot below) displays a message saying to watch the movie on the site. But if you head over to Hulu, The Breakfast Club has been taken out of its search index. A page for the movie is still up, with no video available and the last user review posted two months ago.

We contacted Hulu to ask what had happened to that favorite ’80s teen angst flick. A spokesperson said the movie “expired on our site due to rights issues for the content.”

Other movies removed from the site since launch, she said, include Breaking Away, The Blues Brothers, and Conan the Barbarian.

Expiring episodes is all too common for streaming television shows, but comes as a bit of a surprise for these old movies. And dead streams are exacerbated by Hulu’s liberal embedding policy, because they show up in empty players all around the web, like the one in our story.