The price of these treasures = $9.99 a month. Fair enough, but you’ll still be looking at ads.

No launch date was announced for Hulu Plus, and the service appears to be in a working beta that rolls out in stages.

Early adopters can get in on the Hulu Plus preview, if and when they’re selected. Another possiblity: Follow Hulu on Twitter and Facebook, and hope you’re picked at random. (Apply and you’ll be asked about your age and related electronics.)

Here’s what’s known about features:

“Current Season Ticket” – The full season of primetime shows from ABC, NBC and Fox. The Hulu Plus promo page lists 33 shows, including “Dancing With the Stars,” “Desperate Housewives,” “Glee,” “The Office,” “Saturday Night Live,” “Happy Town” and “Lost.”

Previous seasons — “Every episode of every season from many of TV’s greatest shows,” including “The X-Files,” “Heroes,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Ally McBeal” and some of the series listed above.

Going mobile — Connections to the service are made via broadband, 3G and wifi.

iThings — iPhones (3GS up), the iPad and iPod Touch (third generation). All via the Apple App Store.

TV devices — Some TVs and Blu-ray players from Samsung, Sony and Vizio.

Game consoles — PlayStation3 and Xbox 360, with PS3 up first and the Xbox sometime in 2011.

HD — “High def” in 720p resolution for HD-native content. That means all top current TV shows.

In a perfect world, all this would be an upgrade to the existing free Hulu, but the media giants who own the shop made it clear in the past year that revenues had to start flowing from viewers’ pockets. Hulu tried to monetize itself solely with advertising revenues, but that didn’t prove rich enough for its owners.

“Hulu Plus is not a replacement for Hulu.com,” Jason Kilar writes on the online video service’s blog. “Hulu Plus is a new, revolutionary ad-supported subscription product that is incremental and complementary to the existing Hulu service.”

He then repeats the corporate mantra that this business model will “work for all three of our customers, and those are our end users, our advertisers, and our content suppliers.”

The new revenue source could attract other networks such as CBS and HBO. Fierce Online Video has an interesting analysis about how Hulu Plus will affect Netflix and cable’s TV Everywhere initiative. Comcast, the force behind the cable online video service, is about to acquire NBC, making things even more interesting. In any case, one winner of this battle royal will be consumers.

“On first blush, Hulu Plus throws an industrial-sized wrench into the plans of the TV Everywhere engine, while at the same time pushing the fortunes of over-the-top delivery and online video to new highs,” Fierce Online Video wrote.

Update: Silicon Alley Insider makes the argument that Hulu Plus is no replacement for cable TV service — assuming someone thought it was.

NewsCorp.’s Chase Carey floated the Hulu paid content concept last fall.

For consumers, Hulu offers this video pitch:

The big-media video site just confirmed that it’s sticking with Flash — and passing on HTML5 — meaning iPad owners won’t be getting their must-see TV from Hulu anytime soon.

“We continue to monitor developments on HTML5, but as of now it doesn’t yet meet all of our customers’ needs,” according to Hulu’s blog.

HTML5 falls short in ad reporting, security, quality of video, buffering correction and “dozens of other things,” Hulu says.

Adobe’s Flash requires plug-ins to work on browsers. HTML5 advances the basic code that’s behind the curtain of all web sites, allowing for lots of goodies, including direct online video.

With HTML5, viewing becomes just another part of the web-page browsing experience — no plug-ins needed. That means open source, as Apple loves to point out. That also means Adobe won’t be raking in the cash for its proprietary Flash.

Hulu, meanwhile, has busted out with a new player scheme that’s looking kind of buggy based on user feedback. The home page and the TV and movie pages have been face-lifted with a new focus on personalization.

The changes to the Hulu video player include:

• Adaptive bitrate streaming — allows for dynamic shifting of video bitrates and resolution in order to smooth out the viewing experience. You do have the option of a fixed resolution, say 480p, but don’t come crying to Hulu if the image is all stuttery.
• Ad volume normalization.
• Closed captioning display options — Adds yellow text, if you like.
• Timeline thumbnails — A preview image pops up, as with some DVDs. Sorry, you’ll still have to watch the ads.
• A bigger player — The native resolution is now 729×404, an increase of about 25%.
• “Chromeless” player — No controls visible as a default. Timeline opens on mouse-over.
• Plus some minor design and ergonomic changes that’ll bug everyone in the short term.

The old ad thumbs-up-thumbs-down scheme is now “Ad Tailor.” The intrusion factor is upped by multiple-question surveys that’ll pop up “occasionally.” You have the option of watching an ad instead, so pick your poison. “The more efficiently we can match ads up with users, the more everyone benefits,” Hulu promises.

Google and Apple are the high-profile fans of HTML5, which remains in the standards process but looms over the web like the mothership in “V” — viewable on Hulu, in Flash.

Numerous reports say the Hulu Plus service will give subscribers access to a deeper archive of TV series for a monthly fee of $9.95. Testing is expected to begin as soon as May 24, the Los Angeles Times reported, following up on its premium Hulu exclusive of last January. The reports didn’t provide much detail beyond that.

Co-owner News Corp. has been pushing for user-generated revenues for almost a year, with News Corp. No. 2 Chase Carey taking the lead. Hulu chief Jason Kilar has been chumming the waters for the service as well.

The Hulu faithful apparently won’t be losing out on what they have now: The plan has Hulu staying the course with its menu of the five most recent episodes of network TV offerings.

Two-year-old Hulu, like YouTube, has tried to monetize itself solely with advertising revenues, but neither strategy has proved rich enough for their owners. The networks have been making noises about charging cablers, who are firewalling content with the Comcast-driven TV Everywhere service, which offers online viewing of new shows to cable subscribers.

Netflix, meanwhile, says the bloc of its subscribers who viewed more than 15 minutes of its streaming service Watch Instantly hit 55% in the first quarter, up from 48% in Q4 2009. The number a year ago was 36%.

“It is clear that our performance, and the overall appeal of the Netflix service, is being driven by subscribers watching instantly,” red envelope king Reed Hastings said, throwing in the clever lower-case.

One reason is Netflix’s heavy promotion on subscriber pages, even though Watch Instantly comes at no extra charge. Another is the mother ship’s steady upgrades to what was a fairly mangy online catalog — for example, the addition of Criterion Collection streaming videos. (Criterion is on Hulu as well, but so far its offerings might as well be dubbed the Blind Swordsman Channel.)

Netflix stock went on a tear this week, rising briefly above the $100 mark on strong subscriber growth (to 14 million) and analysts’ upgrades. Stockholders have seen their money double in a little more than a year.

Netflix just debuted its Watch Instantly fare on the Wii console, making the online videos available on all three top game systems.

Disclaimer: I’m a Netflix stockholder, wearing a big greedy grin … but remembering that trees don’t grow to the skies.

The news comes as Hulu failed to renegotiate a deal for content from Comedy Central, owned by Viacom.

Hulu cast the departures as a wrenching loss for its viewers: “Our users have been extremely vocal and passionate about how much they love what the Comedy Central folks are doing.” The fun’s over on March 10.

In a Hulu blog post about Comedy Central that reads like a hail-Mary bit of negotiation, Hulu added: “We’ve driven steadily increasing revenue per view as advertisers voted with their budgets to take advantage of innovative ad formats and very strong advertising effectiveness.”

Comedy Central replied: “We had a great experience with Hulu, and we hope to work with its team again in the future.”

Hulu viewers were quick to pile on: “Let your corporate sponsors know that me and quite a few other people will be heading back to torrents due to this,” one guy groused.

The two late-night shows remain free on their own websites. But the video images are sharp and clear on Hulu, while the Comedy Central streams look soft, with oddly oversatured colors. The audio seems a bit better on Hulu as well.

“The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” debuted on Hulu in the summer of 2008. Hulu’s traffic began its dramatic gains about that time.

Erik Flannigan, executive vice president of digital media at MTV Networks, said at the time that the Hulu placement was a public service, given the creepy fact that something like 20 percent of young Americans said they got their political news from Stewart and his comic spawn.

The big-media online video site is working on a plan that would allow viewers to access the five most recent airings of hit TV series, but older episodes would require a subscription fee of something like $5, the Los Angeles Times said in breaking the paid Hulu story.

Not all series would require paid access, the Times said, speculating that 20 primetime shows would be involved.

Hulu is owned by News Corp., Disney and NBC Universal, an arrangement that has long fueled speculation that the online video site’s days were numbered, at least as a free entity.

Not a shocker. NewsCorp. bigshot Chase Carey signaled the bad news about Hulu last fall:

“I think a free model is a very difficult way to capture the value of our content,” Carey told a conference put on by Broadcasting & Cable. “I think what we need to do is deliver that content to consumers in a way where they will appreciate the value. Hulu concurs with that, it needs to evolve to have a meaningful subscription model as part of its business.”

Comcast’s takeover of NBC Uni probably figured into the subscription-model thinking, as the cabler seeks to wall off network programming on the Internet, a fear of consumer groups.

Hulu welcomed the new year by providing its blog readers with some of its online video stats from 2009. It’s a good read for Hulu trackers, with lots of wowie-zowie numbers to crunch.

We’re a bit burned out on numbers just now. Here are some programming highlights.

• The most popular shows on Hulu were “Saturday Night Live,” “Family Guy,” “The Office,” “The Simpsons” and “Naruto Shippuden.” (WTF is “Naruto Shippuden” you ask?)
• The clip with the most views was “Motherlove” from “SNL” — another howler from the “Dick in the Box” guys. (Guest stars MILF immortals Susan Sarandon and Patricia Clarkson)
• The No. 1 full episode was “Stew-Roids” from Fox’s “Family Guy.”
• The live video stream of President Obama’s Inauguration was voted in as the most embedded chunk of video.

The popular online video site that’s prized for its free streams of TV shows “needs to evolve to have a meaningful subscription model as part of its business,” Carey told a broadcasting conference Oct. 22.

News Corp. owns Hulu along with NBC Universal and Disney.

He was quoted on Hulu’s future by Broadcasting & Cable, which sponsored the conference.

Carey predicted some paid content would show up on Hulu in 2010, but admitted he’d only sat in on one of its board meetings. He said an outright firewall didn’t make sense, but charging for specialty video such as TV previews did.

“I think a free model is a very difficult way to capture the value of (News Corp.’s) content,” Carey said. “I think what we need to do is deliver that content to consumers in a way where they will appreciate the value.”

The Hulu Desktop, billed as “a lean-back viewing experience,” works with robust Macs and PCs (view system requirements). The app is downloaded from the Hulu site. Beyond that no browser is needed. You’ll need a current version of Flash for the thing to work.

The Desktop will feel familiar to fans of Boxee, the open-source media center app that Hulu unplugged from its video stream months ago. Unfortunately, the Hulu Desktop starts playing a video upon launch, a feature that’s drawing complaints from beta testers.

The Desktop takes commands from remotes for the Windows Media Center and Apple devices (as well as keyboards and your mouse). Linking the computer and your TV monitor would bring Hulu to your living room, of course.

Although you don’t need a Hulu account to use the Desktop, it looks like a good thing to link up for those who want access to their queue, histories and playback preferences. “Friends” aren’t welcome, so far.

The beta is very much for real. A lot of people are looking for bugs in the Hulu Desktop, and finding them. There seems to be a pattern of crashing after a few minutes of playing. Interesting comments in the thread.

Other products on the Hulu Labs page include a Video Panel Designer, which produces embeddable widgets. Webmasters can select a design from a fairly robust panel, with six color schemes. The width and size are customizable as well. There are various options such as full-length programs or clips.

Some shows and movies are only available as clips. Hulu says that “generally speaking” all of its content is available via the desktop client, but gives itself an out due to content providers’ wishes. There are ads on the videos (”limited commercial interruption”).

There are persistent reports that Hulu’s iPhone app is on the horizon, but this Flash-dependent client is of no apparent help. (It’s conceivable that the Hulu-iPhone app could be revealed at the Apple Developer Conference next week.)

The Labs page also has tryout versions of a recommendation system and a modest page for “time-based browsing” that allows users to search by date. The recommendation-feature preview, oddly, requires a login to view.

Macworld has a good overview and basic review of the Hulu Desktop.

You may recall that CBS Labs launched a similar page last year, but it hasn’t provided much beyond the preview of the CBS HD player.

System requirements for Mac include “Intel Pentium Core Duo 2.0GHz (or equivalent), Mac OS v10.4 (Tiger) or later, 2 Mbps Internet connection or greater and 2 gigs of RAM. For PC, it’s Intel Pentium Core Duo 1.8GHz (or equivalent) and Windows XP or our old friend Vista.)

In email messages obtained by the New York Times, Hulu executives have been busy this week complaining to Nielsen about April’s reported loss of unique viewers, down from 7.4 million in March. “Uniques,” of course, is the stat that matters most to advertisers and the media these days.

ComScore, a competitor to Nielsen’s online ratings, reports Hulu’s total audience much higher, at 42 million for March — a spread of 34 million or so compared with Nielsen’s number for that month. (None of the ratings services have direct access to Hulu’s server reports, so one way or another, they’re all estimates.)

The Times weighs in on the mess:

The wildly divergent numbers demonstrate the nascency of the market for online-video measurement. It’s “still the wild, wild West,” said Rob Davis, a leader of the interactive video practice at OgilvyInteractive. … “Industrywide, we need to solve this.”

Meanwhile, Nielsen found some good news for Hulu, as it must:

Streaming-video consumers in the moneyed 35-to-49 demographic hiked their time spent on the site by 154% in the past six months, making it the top demo in viewing hours — an average of almost 7 hours. The 18-24 demo came in second in time spent, while the 25-34 group placed third.

Nielsen Online’s Jon Gibs does a spin drive-by: “Despite what many believe, it is not the young, tech-savvy, early-adopters who are attracted to long-form video. In fact, we see that it is the older crowd, viewers 35-plus, who gravitate toward long-form video, with sites like Hulu acting as a perfect example of this.”

Nielsen said Hulu’s total streams (online videos engaged by viewers) grew from 63.2 million in April 2008 to 373.3 million in April 2009 — some sort of land-speed record.

Hulu ranks second on both Nielsen and comScore’s key charts for online video, far behind Google’s YouTube.

Hulu’s uniques hit a high in February, the month in which the video service announced that its bad self had arrived with this snarky Super Bowl ad featuring Alec Baldwin.

ABC hits such as “Dancing With the Stars,” “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives” are headed for Hulu, reinforcing the site’s ad-supported fare from NBC Universal (NBC) and News Corp. (Fox). Disney owns ABC. Some Disney Channel shows will be shared with Hulu, but not its cash cows “Hannah Montana” and the “High School Musical” spinoffs.

ABC shows currently stream for free on abc.com, some in HD. That site does not appear in the top 10 online video rankings. Hulu will be the first free site to carry ABC shows. The deal also brings the alphabet network’s content to Hulu’s network of partner web sites such as AOL.

As part of the deal, ABC is giving Hulu $25 million in network ad tradeouts, the New York Times reports.

NBC Universal and News Corp. re-upped for another two years on Hulu as part of the new structure.

CBS, the lone wolf at this point, issued a statement saying it preferred to distribute its own shows on the Net. Its shows appear on several outside video sites.

“CBS has long employed open, non-exclusive content partnerships (allowing us to) control our distribution, sales and profit,” the company said Thursday. “Controlling our own rights for that content — in all media — preserves its value in a multi-platform business system.”

Talks for Disney to go exclusively with revenue-hungry YouTube fell apart over owner Google’s refusal to offer an equity stake in its video site, the Times said. YouTube could only manage a watery deal with Disney that brings clips from ESPN and ABC to the user-generated-content giant. Analysts say YouTube will have to come up with equity or big-time payments to woo premium-content providers.

Another company no doubt watching the developments with interest is Apple, which sells ABC episodes on its iTunes Store. Apple chieftain Steve Jobs is a major Disney shareholder. (MacWorld ponders the Disney-Hulu impact on iTunes.)

Google put out a statement Thursday bragging that “the average YouTube viewer spends nearly 150 minutes a month watching videos on YouTube,” and that the Disney-Hulu deal was good for the online video industry.

Regardless, the new Hulu most likely will swamp YouTube’s aspirations of becoming a premium content player, at least for the next two years.

Hulu is third in market share behind YouTube and Fox, soon to be a distant second. Viewer time spent on Hulu has been increasing impressively.

Meanwhile, Sony’s Crackle video site trumpeted the addition of dozens of guy-friendly movies such as “Spiderman 2,” “Stripes,” “Groundhog Day” and a heaping pile of Japanese “Godzilla” movies.

“These are the movies that matter for guys 18-34,” said Eric Berger of Sony Pictures Television’s digital unit. Crackle also rolled out Cinemactive, an interactive trivia game. Sony Pictures also has embraced trivia games in its Blu-ray BD Live features.

Crackle’s movie page features a scroll of “Assassins and Ass-Kickers,” leaving no doubt that Sony Classics fare won’t be coming soon.