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No longer is web video content the playground of bored high school students and wacky YouTube “stars”. NBC and News Corp have gotten in on the game with the launch of Hulu, a website which gives viewers access to full length television series’ and movies, including popular shows like Heroes, The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live, The Office, and 24. The content is pulled from more than just NBC’s programming; Hulu has partnered with E! Entertainment, FUEL TV, SciFi Network and USA Networks to offer a diversity of shows from different providers. The content is not just pulled from the current prime time schedule either. Older classic shows, including Miami Vice and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, will also be available through Hulu.

Hulu has designed a customized viewing screen, allowing viewers to adjust the size of the window, the brightness/sounds from the browser, and the placement of the screen in the browser for multi-tasking. While not the typical video sharing site like YouTube, you can embed Hulu clips on your website and select start and stop times for custom clips. Content is also available at partner sites AOL, Comcast, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo, all of which have their own video players for seamless viewing. The interface is sleek, yet familiar, and the picture quality is much better than your average web video.

Beta testing is being conducted privately, with a waiting list for users who want to test out the site (you can see a sample video by visiting the “blog” page). It seems, however, that feedback from a small test group is about as much viewer input as Hulu wants. The user participation stops at “thumbs up/down” functions, written reviews, and playlists. They have reportedly enlisted students from film schools to create content from existing offerings: one clips is a montage of the many times Homer Simpson says “D’oh!”

Is the user participation level at Hulu undemocratic? Hardcore YouTube fans might say so. The younger generation of Web 2.0 users have certain expectations for new sites, and those expectations generally include high-level customization/personalization, a forum where one’s own creativity or thoughts are showcased, and a highly interactive community surrounding the site (read: Facebook, MySpace, Second Life, or YouTube). Hulu might be fighting against that aspect of web culture, but they also might be aiming at a different audience entirely. Older web users tend to seek static entertainment from the web. Casual internet users in their late twenties and thirties have trouble buying into sites like Facebook because they can’t understand how to customize a page. They feel that by interacting with a website they might “break” something permanently. Perhaps Hulu is planning to cash in on this demographic, who feel more comfortable absorbing web content than creating it. This user might catch up on last night’s episode of House on a lunch break at work, for example.

Hulu will be free to users with revenue coming from ads. This is a smart move if they plan to compete with outfits like YouTube. Their press kit states, “Hulu’s (ambitious and never-ending) mission is to help consumers find and enjoy the world’s premium content when, where and how they want it”; this suggests that they don’t see themselves as competing with user-generated content sites, and I agree. They offer a different product entirely in the form of mainstream TV and movies. I, for one, hope the venture proves successful. How else will I catch up on all those missed episodes of The Office?

Thursday, November 8th, 2007 Both comments and pings are currently closed.

By Haley January Eckels