Hulu Hoopla
Sunday marked the first day of a private beta for the much anticipated Hulu video service, the first major initiative by content owners rather than technology companies, thereby making the whole licensing issue with television, film and music providers for their content much simpler. Hulu is the new-media creation of two old-media rivals, NBC, which is owned by General Electric, and Fox, owned by the News Corporation.
It will pick up shows from Sony Pictures Television and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. Videos will be available via the Hulu site as well as its partner network, which includes Yahoo, Microsoft, MySpace, AOL, and others.
Hulu will offer video content on an advertising-driven basis free to users. The videos on Hulu are full of promotional opportunities, including overlays, promotional graphics that roam over the bottom of the screen during a show. For each show streamed online, Hulu splits the revenue with the content creator and the distribution site, like MySpaceTV or MSN. The revenue splits vary by the type of program, but the content owner takes a majority.
Hulu was first announced in March and was originally seen as a rival to Google’s YouTube, which had come under scrutiny for copyright infringement. But Hulu is all about current TV shows, movies and professionally produced content. There’s no upload function. It’s much more like Joost than YouTube, except that you don’t have to download special software like you do with Joost. However, NBC Universal has stopped offering its shows for sales on iTunes and pulled its channel off of YouTube.