Hulu Looms and I Pray That FOX is Taking the Reigns

CNNMoney.com had an interesting story about Hulu.  For those of you (like me) who are just hearing about it, Hulu is a joint project between NBC and FOX - that's right, a partnership between NBC and FOX - with the aim of providing a legal online venue for viewing their content.

Here's a little bit right from CNNMoney.com's  article

In May, Providence Equity Partners offered a cool $100 million for a 10% stake - giving the nascent operation an astonishing valuation of $1 billion.

But the secret of Hulu's initial success - the thing that made believers out of the skeptics - is the power and simplicity of the website itself. Hulu's creators focused with almost obsessive attention to detail on the user's experience. The first thing you see when you visit Hulu is a big screen offering a TV clip with a prominent "watch now" button. You can scroll through a half-dozen of these featured offerings, browse the most popular episodes, or search shows by name - from vintage NBC series like McHale's Navy to the latest episode of Fox's The Simpsons. Hulu even lets you search for competitors' content, like ABC's Desperate Housewives. "If it's legally available anywhere on the web, we want to take you to it," says Kilar.

For folks like me, this is great.  I'm in an area where over-the-air Television signals are sporadic at best and I can't afford pay TV.  I am a huge nerd was turned on to Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles and was told that FOX.com had full episodes available online.  I checked it out, and it's true!  At the time I checked it out they had from episode 4 through the second-to-last episode.  The ads only totaled about 3 minutes per episode, and only the most recent episodes even had ads at all.  You can go all the way up to full-screen and it looks great.  They also post incredibly fast.  The season finale was last Monday.  The site says that new episodes will be up "1-2 days after the TV broadcast."  The finale (in its entire 2-part glory) was up on Tuesday.  

I'm really impressed with what FOX has done and am anxiously awaiting my "invitation" to sign up with the Hulu Beta.  If you check out their site you can watch whatever the current featured video is.  I personally think that everyone should register for a beta account, if for no other reason than to let FOX and NBC that they've got the right idea.

This is something that I've talked about before when I posted on a Retuers article about how somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% of Americans get their news online as opposed to from traditional (TV/Radio/Print) sources.  Old media companies can sit back in fear of the internet and throw out the occasional insult or they can embrace it.  As I said before, I'm a firm believer that the ones who are of the embracing variety are going to see the most success.

Something else it brings to mind is the current net neutrality row.  Much like BitTorrent and VUZE, Hulu could see its users suffer bandwidth losses and in turn have their usability limited by ISPs who favor their own VoD content but hide behind "reasonable network management."  Maybe Hulu, with its incredibly powerful partners, can stand up for net neutrality and fight the big internet providers on a level playing field.

To end on a more positive note, is there anyone reading who already has a Hulu account?  Let us know what you think about it.