From DVR to On-Demand, more and more TV viewers are choosing when they get to watch their favorite programs. The greater question has been how you’ll be able to get all the other content to your screen — stuff like Netflix and Hulu. If you have an Xbox, the latter problem may be a thing of the past. → Read More
The Jay Leno/Conan O’Brien fight over the Tonight Show is long over. Leno soldiers on, and O’Brien is out mixing it up with real people on tour.
ut the resistance movement carries on, and Coco supporters (as O’brien is known) have found a bunch of outlets to vent their frustration. Some trick Leno into taking pictures supporting Coco. Others hang out on a Facebook page supporting him called “I’m with Coco / Conan O’Brien.”
But now there’s another way, and this one is likely to piss off NBC. Go to any Tonight Show clip on Hulu and check out the user added tags that appear in the mouseover. → Read More
While the LA Times noted that Hulu would soon be offering Hulu plus by May 24, the $10 will apparently not be rolled out by next Monday, thus allowing you unfettered access to the intellectual produce of thousands of studio employees for a least a few more months. → Read More
VP Eugene Wei might have overstepped recently when he posted to the Hulu company blog that they are looking at HTML 5, but don’t expect it to meet their needs any time soon. This is disappointing to iPad users since the current Hulu player won’t work for them. → Read More
It seemed like only yesterday that Joost and Hulu were seen as also-rans. Surprisingly, the latter online video streaming service has taken off and is now offering a $10 per month “plus” service and will be rolling it out to select markets by May 24. The LA Times writes that the service will offer a “more comprehensive selection” over the current one limited episode model. There is, sadly, no more information. The suggestion here is that Hulu, in the end, will be the source for streaming TV. The company is a joint venture of NBC, Fox, and ABC and, as such, has become a clearing house for popular broadcast television. The question here is what constitutes a more comprehensive selection – I suspect full seasons as well as almost immediate simulcasting of broadcast programming – but that has yet to be decided. → Read More
If you head over to Hulu right now and start watching a video, you’ll notice that the site has turned on a new 3D feature. At least, it looks like they were trying to — when you click the button, the site instead opens a video marked “Hulu Confidential — For Internal Use Only” (looks like there’s a pretty major typo in their code).
The video is a ten minute documentary detailing the long-running conspiracy behind Hulu’s alien plot to turn our brains into goo. It begins with footage of television pioneer Philo Farnsworth (an alien-sounding name, indeed), winds through the 20th century, and concludes with Hulu, which finally helped TV’s brain-melting content expand its reach well beyond the living room. → Read More
The pending $30 billion merger of Comcast and NBC-Universal is going to complicate things for Hulu, the second most popular online video site after YouTube. Hulu is a joint venture between NBC, News Corp/Fox, and (since last year) Disney/ABC. It was created by the TV networks as a counterweight to YouTube, a safe place where they could run their full-length TV shows online with their own ads.
Comcast, however, is championing TV Everywhere, which is an entirely different model for professionally-produced Web video. TV Everywhere is going to put TV channels online behind a paywall where only existing cable subscribers can watch them. Once Comcast owns a part of Hulu, there will be more pressure to put parts of Hulu behind a paywall as well. One knowledgeable industry source speculates that “Comcast will push Hulu very hard to become an authenticated destination for TV Everywhere.” → Read More
When Hulu first launched, it was supposed to be the media industry’s answer to YouTube: a place where shows and movies from TV would find an audience online and make advertising money directly for the media companies backing it instead of sharing any of that video ad money with YouTube. All that professional quality video from NBC, Fox, and Comedy Central brought in a huge audience, helping Hulu grow into the second largest video site online with more than 1 billion video views a month.
Well, that formula is great for Hulu, but it isn’t working for one of its biggest media partners. Yesterday, Viacom decided to pull two of the top shows from Hulu: Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report and The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. Viacom made the calculation that it can make more money by recentralizing distribution of its hit shows on its own sites than allowing them to be streamed on Hulu. Why should they split video ad revenues with Hulu when they can have it all themselves → Read More
Hulu investor Providence Equity Partners is pumping $50 million into a new online video company set up by Chinese Internet search giant Baidu.
The news comes roughly 7 weeks after Baidu confirmed plans to established a new independent company to provide licensed, advertising-supported online video content to Chinese Internet users. → Read More
When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad last month, one notable potential partner absent from the stage was Hulu, now the second-largest video site on the Web. The launch event focussed more on the iPad as an eBook reader to rival the Kindle, but watching videos on it will be just as important. The TV shows on Hulu would be perfect on the iPad. There is just one hitch: the iPad doesn’t support Flash, and all of Hulu’s videos currently run inside a Flash player.
But that could change by the time the iPad launches in March. One rumor I’ve heard from an industry insider is that Hulu is working on an iPad-friendly version of its site that should be ready by the time the iPad hits the market. → Read More
YouTube might be streaming more than 13 billion videos a month, or nearly 40 percent of total individual streams, but when you measure by time spent YouTube only accounted for 26 percent of all viewing minutes on the Web last year. It is not surprising that it commands a smaller share of time spent watching videos than number of streams watched, since most YouTube videos are so short. But what is surprising is how fragmented the Web video landscape remains once you go out past the top 25 sites.
According to comScore’s 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review, more than half of all time spent watching videos on the Web (52 percent) last year was on Long Tail video sites beyond the top 25. What you see is a real barbell distribution, with Youtube on one end and the Long Tail sites on the other. Total video views more than doubled between December, 2008 and December, 2009, from 14 billion to 33 billion streams. So there is hope yet for niche video producers. → Read More
If I may, I’d like to play devil’s advocate to something I wrote a few days ago. To quickly summarize, Boxee took issue with NBCU’s Jeff Zucker’s characterization that Boxee was some sort of rogue piece of software, and that Hulu is in the right whenever it blocks access to the XBMC-derived media player. How about this: maybe Hulu is right to block Boxee? Let’s see where this takes us. → Read More
Yes, it’s perfectly possible to watch Hulu from outside the United States if you know how to hide your location, but there are millions of people who don’t who would love to get access to the streaming service. For them, there’s now TVGorge, a recently launched Flash streaming site that’s still in ‘infant stages’ but has a lot to offer already.
Million dollar question is: is it legal? → Read More
The world’s worst manager, Jeff Zucker, who just so happens to be the president of NBC Universal, was on Capitol Hill today trying to persuade lawmakers to allow the proposed merger with Comcast go through. Interesting to note his take on Boxee’s relationship with Hulu, which, you’ll recall, has been something of a mess. Boxee adds Hulu compatibility, Hulu breaks said compatability, Boxee re-works its code so that Hulu works again, Hulu breaks compatability again, etc. And on and on and on. → Read More
There was some hoopla yesterday about the news that Hulu had broken the 1 billion videos viewed in a month threshold in December. And rightfully so, it’s the first video service to do that other than YouTube. But there’s another hot property that is rising fast in the streaming video realm as well: Netflix.
The movie rental giant crossed into the top 20 video sites on the web for the first time in December, according to numbers from ComScore. Specifically, they now sit at number 19, just ahead of Break Media, and just behind Justin.TV. And with over 127 million views last month, and rising fast, it shouldn’t be long before they’re in the top 15 with the likes of Facebook and ESPN. → Read More
Chinese Internet search giant Baidu this morning announced plans to set up a new independent company to provide licensed, advertising-supported online video content to Chinese Internet users.
Reuters earlier this week caught wind of the company’s plans to launch the Hulu-like destination site, and also reported that Hulu investor Providence Equity Partners was going to have a significant stake in the venture. → Read More
It’s been a big year for Hulu, the video streaming site that lets you watch a large variety of premium content free of charge. The site has grown from a destination for the tech-savvy to a mainstream hit in the two years since its launch, and much of that growth came in the last 10 months or so. Hulu has just written a blog post about the last year, and it boasts some pretty big numbers.
CEO Jason Kilar writes that Hulu is now up to 43 million unique visitors — a 95% increase over the same time period last year. That’s impressive, but it’s also not much more than the 41.5 million it had back in April. In fact, in terms of unique visitors, Hulu’s growth seems to be fairly stagnant, which could indicate that the market is getting saturated. → Read More
Hulu Labs, the premium video content site’s platform that offers users experimental new features, has just rolled out a nifty new feature called Captions Search.
Captions Search lets you search for keywords within the closed captions for videos of TV shows on the site. Closed Captioning is the transcript and text from a television or video screen that’s often used as a way for the hearing-impaired to watch television. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
