For years media companies have struggled on how to distribute their content online. Youtube postings were illegal in most cases but had the most traffic while corporate websites like nbc.com and mtv.com gave companies control of the content yet were not built as user friendly web video depositories.
Similar to how Itunes was the pioneering force behind legal music downloads, newly released hulu.com serves as Fox and Universal’s best stab at distributing content online legally.
Hulu is beginning to get a lot of press so feel free to check out this cnn.com article about its humble beginning and potential impact. A better example of how cool Hulu is can be found in this paste magazine article has embedded the movie The Big Lebowski into the article itself. Hulu actually allows you to embed movies and shows into your blog (not benkoo.com just yet-damn you wordpress)
The website feel is terrific with the actual flash player being very sleek. Currently the programming available is a little meager but we’ll see where this is in a couple of months. About 250 television shows from The Simpsons, The Office, Family Guy, and SNL can be found here. I actually just watched the first 10 minutes of this year’s national championship game on hulu as well (its all downhill from there).
There are a lot of clips of various movies in addition to a small amount of full length movies like Lebowski, The Usual Suspects, and 28 days later.
The catch is that there is advertising sprinkled into the clips. Sometimes you are given the options to watch a movie trailer in front of a full movie opposed to seeing a 15 second commercial every 15 minutes or so.
Hulu has already reached agreements to have video on websites like yahoo, aol, myspace, and MSN. In addition to being redistributed on those sites Hulu has already attracted a who’s who of advertisers including Chili’s, General Motors, Intel, and State Farm.
So next time you find yourself with some time to kill check out hulu.com and see if you can find some more stuff to help you procrastinate.
I definitely am a fan of the site and am eager for wordpress (my blogging software) to add a hulu plugin so I can show hulu content on benkoo.com. The video quality is better than youtube, the videos won’t be taken down, and its a superior web experience opposed to corporate websites. The advertising and trailers are pretty brief and not too obtrusive and the options to share, email, and embed are user friendly. Hopefully in time they will add more content ( I am optimistic they will).
It will be interesting to see how other media companies not involved with Hulu (Sony, Disney, Viacom,) react. They can either jump aboard for a price, build a similar site, or decide to stick with their current web strategies.
