Hulu video site gets down to business
The New York Times does a curtain-raiser on today’s public beta launch of Hulu, the online video service created for NBC and Fox.
CEO Jason Kilar, left, formerly of Amazon, cites the game plan of using only professional programming from a variety of big media players. Hulu’s dance is to present the content, not make it.
“We don’t have to worry about showing TV schedules or letting fans get to know the actors,” he told the Times. “All we have to worry about is the video.”
The Times notes that viewers will find a few distracting elements:
Hulu might prove most attractive to advertisers, since the videos on Hulu are chock-full of promotional opportunities. Messages for companies like Cisco and General Motors remain above the video player during each program. Hulu is also using overlays, promotional graphics that roam over the bottom of the screen during a show. (YouTube is also experimenting with this ad format). Hulu is, however, cutting by half the length of traditional commercial breaks during its videos.
Hulu is another of those zippy meaningless names, for which the project has taken considerable heat. Various wags have pronounced it Clown Co. — site unseen.
See for yourself: Here’s where to sign up for the Hulu beta.
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TiVo owners in for faster downloads
TiVo box owners jonesing for more storage space finally are in luck. The DVR pioneer hooked up with Western Digital to enable an external hard drive. The catch: you must own an advanced TiVo box, as in not Series 2.
The eSATA drive — going by the tag of My DVR Expander — bulks up the TiVo’s storage capacity by 500 gigabytes. That’s roughly 600 hours of standard definition or 65 hours of high-def programming, TiVo says. The hard drive has to be bought at Best Buy or on TiVo’s web site, apparently.
All of the four upgrades announced earlier this week are limited to networked-in owners of Series 3 DVRs.
The DVR pioneer also unveiled a multi-room viewing feature, in which the advanced TiVo boxes can stream content to another TiVo box, including Series 2
“TiVo to Go,” another it’s-about-time feature, allows programs to be ported over to PCs. From there, the video files can watched elsewhere or burned to blank DVDs. Yes, that means they can be sent to iPods and other handheld devices. The PC needs TiVo Desktop software for Windows, Roxio Toast 8 or, for Macs, Popcorn 3.
TiVo also has joined Vudu in the progressive-downloading game. Instead of waiting for movies or TV shows from Amazon Unbox
(This capability is one of Vudu’s main sales pitches. The 2-month-old service just lowered the price of the Vudu box from $399 to $250, taking a cue from Steve Jobs.)
Here’s the word on how the TiVo progressive downloading is supposed to work, direct from the company’s antenna-wearing PRists:
When a download begins, the TiVo box checks the speed of the download, and calculates whether you can begin playback. If the download speed is going faster than playback speed, it will let users start playback immediately.
If the download is slower, it will wait until users have enough of the program “buffered” on disk to be able to play it from start to finish without hitting the end of the buffer, and then let you start playback.
None of these are breakthroughs, except in the TiVo universe. While well past due, it’s good to see the upgrades, which signal to company is working hard to justify its existence.
Read the TiVo press release.
‘American Gangster’ robbed by torrent video
The latest victim of illegal pre-boxoffice video streaming is “American Gangster.”
The Ridley Scott movie, starring Denzel Washington
The copy appears to come from an Academy Award “for your consideration” DVD screener, meaning it’s of high quality.Oscar voters are swimming in advance DVDs of unreleased movies come late fall, and they’re sworn not to copy, screen or otherwise distribute. But pretty much anyone in L.A. who’s plugged knows someone who gets the discs.
The MPAA’s piracy fighters tried to shut down the use of DVDs a few years back, but the studios and filmmakers rebelled. Who has the time to go to all those movies, the Academy’s aging voters cry — even though they always get in free. They’re voting for their pals, anyway.
Inside tip: Most of the Oscar votes of the past decade were informed by VHS (aka video horse shit) tapes.”Sicko” and “Hostel II” were among the recent victims of prerelease downloads, although in “Sicko’s” case the publicity probably outweighed the losses.
NBC’s latest YouTube defection a power play
NBC’s decision to pull its content from YouTube — in order to promote its upcoming Hulu video hut — is another blow to the sunshine paradigm in which visual entertainment is collected at one massively popular freebie destination.
Old media may seem dumb, but in the long run they’re not going to allow an indie to frolick with profits from their massive investments. Eventually, they assume, motivated viewers will seek out the content they want, wherever it’s posted, especially if it’s free. Grazers and samplers are collateral damage.
The effects of NBC Universal, News Corp., Viacom and other major media pulling back from YouTube include a clipping of the power that’s accrued so quickly to the user-driven video grab bag. The dark suits would like nothing more than to see YouTube reduced to nothing more than the home of Starwars Kid and foaming Pepsi fountains.
Let’s look at Google (which bought YouTube about this time last year). For better or worse, this college student startup only needed a half dozen years to became the default location for online concent searches. Its older and less imaginative competitors were reduced to fighting over search scaps. Google’s awesome power in the Internet world is of increasing concern as online content providers (including you, me and NBC) bow and scrape to keep its search engine happy. Google is about a half step away from a de facto monopoly.
No one in the media business is interested in seeing YouTube become to video what Google is to search.
NBC told YouTube on Friday that the content was coming down. An NBC Uni rep told newteevee.com that YouTube was merely a “promotional” service. NBC should know.
Here’s Wendy Davis of MediaPost on the love-hate history of NBC and YouTube:
The marks the latest wrinkle in a relationship that has had several ups and downs since YouTube launched. When the “Saturday Night Live” skit “Lazy Sunday” appeared on the video-sharing site in late 2005, the clip helped catapult the site to national prominence and also became a viral sensation. But the clip drew the wrath of NBC executives, who insisted that they wanted to stream it from their own site and, in February 2006, demanded that YouTube remove it.
Eventually, however, NBC not only settled its differences with YouTube, but forged a promotional agreement with the site, using it as a direct channel to viewers.
A YouTube statement noted the success of NBC’s promotional efforts there and hoped for more interaction down the road.
NBC recently wrassled with Apple over control and price of the network’s paid content, turning its attentions to Amazon’s Unbox.
So the network now has alienated the active youthful communities of iTunes and YouTube. Power plays are expensive in this day and age.
‘Daily Show’ online — all 8 years’ worth
Want more than just your “Daily” dose? Fans of Jon Stewart’s gooney-news show will be swimming in video later today when Comedy Central unleashes a web site featuring a searchable database of shows past.The site — thedailyshow.com — will serve up about 13,000 video segments, representing everything ever on the show since its 1999 debut, the Los Angeles Times reported this morning.Users will be able to search by topic as well as date. There will be lots more of “The Daily Show” to post, apparently, as host Stewart signed a contract extension that’ll keep the irony coming until at least 2010, the network said Thursday.Comedy Central owner Viacom has filed a $1 billion copyright suit against YouTube over its users’ postings of “The Daily Show” and other corporate programs. That move resulted in the show coming down from YouTube, where it was a huge draw.The dead-end site should work for active fans of the show, but this just feels like another old-media move.Media Post’s Wendy Davis calls it like this:
Obviously, the venture is an experiment, marking Viacom’s attempts to figure out what will work online. And, while posting clips on a Viacom-owned site makes more sense than letting them gather dust in a vault, the new initiative might not be the best way to get clips seen. … Attempting to corral all of a show’s clips on one site doesn’t seem like an optimal strategy. Also, while the new site is still a work-in-progress, it’s not yet clear whether Viacom intends to add features that will encourage the viral spread of clips. But without that ability, the site’s potential seems limited.
Earlier this week, YouTube unveiled its automated service allowing copyright holders to effectively ban their shows from the video-sharing site. Meanwhile, Viacom floated the idea of working with YouTube again.
