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13 Mar 2008
Hulu, the video site backed by NBC and News Corp, officially opened to the public on Wednesday following a closed beta testing period which began in October.
Hulu will allow users to view clips and full-length episodes of TV shows and movies. The videos are free, but users will have to sit through advertisements in order to watch the shows and films.
The site will launch with roughly 250 shows and about 100 feature-length films from the two studios. The site also expects to add new content in the future, when Warner Bros and Lion's Gate come onboard.
Jason Kilar, chief executive at Hulu, said: "With full-length episodes of current and archived television shows, feature films, sports and news, we believe Hulu is a step forward in giving consumers entertainment on their terms. "
Hulu is the latest attempt by television and film studios to build a money-making legal video site to rival YouTube. The studios have long been at odds with YouTube over the site's inability to prevent users posting copyrighted videos.
NBC and News Corp began work on the Hulu service last summer. The two companies hope that the effort will spread beyond NBC and News Corp, and bring new consumers and studios onto the site.
"Hulu's impressive content line up and user experience are equally important in bringing consumers back again and again," said Jeff Zucker, president and chief executive at NBC Universal.
"These are the same attributes that make Hulu attractive to major brands. Both groups see the value in a quality, clutter-free online service."
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So this is what the strike was all about...
So this is the digital delivery that all the fuss was about. Well, I'm hooked, and I lok forward to helping generate new residuals for the writers, and directors, and producers, and editors, and, well, you get the idea. It's a pretty impressive service, and I don't mind sitting through the commercials, particularly because I find it a fulfilling background passtime while working on other pursuits. Although it's fine to navigate through www.Hulu.com directly, I've been impressed to also find a few websites that have been using the content before it went live, mainly because that's how I got to see what it was all about. For example, through watching airwolf.tv I was probably one of the ones making Airwolf tops in popularity. I loved watching the old show all over again. And frankly, the portability of content makes it more enjoybale to see how those creative types expand upon the basic delivery model and enrich the viewing process. I envision a new generation of surfers - ones who search for and follow the commensurate embedding of their favorite content to find the most enjoyable pairing of streaming delivery with original, related content.
Posted by: SludgeHeap 16 Mar 2008