Hulu Hires Chief Technology Officer | Home Media Magazine

http://m.homemediamagazine.com/hulu/hulu-hires-chief-technology-officer-32600

Rovi takes Hulu to court

Rovi filed a patent infringement lawsuit in Delaware against Hulu alleging the video content streaming service is violating three program guide patents. Rovi's licensees include Apple, Comcast and Microsoft.

Read about it:

Reuters: Hulu accused of infringing program guide patent
Gigaom: Rovi sues Hulu over program guide patents

Post-PC TV: How and Where We Watch Netflix, Hulu and YouTube | Epicenter | Wired.com

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/07/post-pc-netflix-hulu-youtube

Apple to Consider a Bid for Hulu

From Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. (AAPL), with $76.2 billion in cash and securities on its books, is considering making a bid for the Hulu online video service, two people with knowledge of the auction said.

Apple, the world’s second-most-valuable company, is in early talks that may lead to an offer for Hulu, said the people, who weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

Hulu would give Apple a new subscription service and represent a possible challenge to Netflix Inc. (NFLX) Hulu’s media- company owners, Walt Disney Co. (DIS), News Corp. (NWSA) and Comcast Corp. (CMCSA)’s NBC Universal, are offering suitors a five-year extension of program rights, including two years of exclusive access, people familiar with the matter said earlier this week.

“Part of the ecosystem of Apple’s future is to include more video,” said Scott Sutherland, Wedbush Securities Inc. analyst in San Francisco who recommends buying the stock. “It’s something they are focused on.”

Read the rest of the article HERE

Google, Microsoft are among potential Hulu buyers

Talks have begun with potential buyers of Hulu, and Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger says the site's current owners are "committed to selling." The company, which is on course to reach more than 1 million users faster than initially predicted, could go for more than $2 billion. If Hulu is sold, its current owners, which include Disney, Comcast's NBCUniversal and News Corp., would continue to supply content for the site, but it is not clear for how long.

Bloomberg: Disney’s Iger Says Hulu’s Owners Are ‘Committed to Selling’   

The Wall Street Journal (tiered subscription model)

Reuters:  Hulu to hit 1 million paid users by summer's end

With new video player, Hulu goes with Flash over HTML5

Hulu has introduced a new online video player and opted to stick with Adobe Flash technology as opposed to the HTML5 platform that Apple has been championing. "When it comes to technology, our only guiding principle is to best serve the needs of all of our key customers: our viewers, our content partners who license programs to us, our advertisers, and each other," said Hulu Vice President Eugene Wei. "We continue to monitor developments on HTML5, but as of now it doesn't yet meet all of our customers' needs."

Read more at: InformationWeek

Because NBC Could Never Have Figured Out How To Put TV Shows On The Internet By Itself...

From TechDirt.com:
Because NBC Could Never Have Figured Out How To Put TV Shows On The Internet By Itself...
I've been pretty hard on NBC Universal and its partially owned subsidiary Hulu for some consistently poor strategic decisions making over the years, but this recent lawsuit against them seems pretty ridiculous. AdamR points us to the news that a company you probably haven't heard of called Hulavision (its founder is Errol Hula -- get it?) is suing NBC and Hulu claiming that they stole the idea for Hulu and the name. The details of the case don't look much more convincing:

Hulavision and principal Errol Hula claim that the company developed technology to deliver television programs directly to viewers online. Hula then met with NBCU business development exec Raymond Vergel de Dios at a Las Vegas trade show and was invited to have further discussions about working together. In the spring of 2006, Hula and NBCU allegedly signed a nondisclosure agreement, after which Hula revealed his company's business model, marketing strategy, product roadmap and a "shared revenue model chart" that included valuable trade secrets.

Yes. Apparently he seems to think that the concept, technology and business model of taking TV shows and putting them online is his and his alone. As if NBC wasn't likely to figure out how to take video and put it online. And, really, if they were going to take the name from Hula, you'd at least think they'd use a name that was a lot more indicative of video online. There is simply no benefit at all to NBC purposely trying to take Hula's name for Hulu.

Hulu Doesn't play well with others.

Currently most high end Blue Ray players can stream content from Netflix, Blockbuster, YouTube and Pandora. Some also offer CinemaNow.

One giant in streaming media web sites is missing Hulu.

On Settopbox devices Sling supports Hulu but Roku does not.

Google Video, Sling.com and Bing.com are the few that seems to have Hulu distribution agreements.  

Boxee, TV.com and Rippol all have been forced to remove Hulu content from their sites and applications.


Roku Channel Store Opens, Hulu Is a No-Show  Nov 22,2009
Pandora, Facebook Photos, Revision3, Mediafly, TWiT, blip.tv, Flickr, FrameChannel, Motionbox and MobileTribe, Netflix, MLB.tv and Amazon channels all now available on the Roku player

In Hulu's note to Rippol, the representative stated that "the only way for a company to legitimately embed our videos the way you do is to enter into a structured distribution relationship with us. However, we are currently entering into these very selectively."


According to Hulu:  Don't embed, Link instead


Bing Brings Hulu, YouTube and MSN Video
Describing it as a "new unified online video destination," Microsoft says Bing Videos will combine results from ABC, YouTube, Hulu and MSN Videos. Of course, such a product calls for a new homepage, which Microsoft has dutifully rolled out for Bing Videos.

Sling.com Isn’t Really A Hulu Competitor, But Does Offer Compelling Reasons To Make It Your Go-To Web Portal

SlingMedia run Sling.com, a video portal similar to Hulu.com but with a few extra benefits.

NBC and Fox content is actually served from Hulu.  Sling and Hulu partnered up to bring that content to Sling users, so you’ll still see the Hulu logo and see the Hulu commercials.

Hulu is streaming using Adobe's Secure RTMP protocol.

Appian.com software can capture Hulu Video.

New Plugin from Google lets you Stream Hulu and Netflix videos with Frontrow 2/09



Understudy is a plug in for Mac OS X interface Front Row. Users can subscribe to multiple feeds and watch from Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, and the BBC iPlayer.



Email from Hulu to Rippol hours after they launched.

We saw that you launched today. We want to notify you that you are using our embeds in violation of our terms of service which state specifically that embeds are for personal, non-commercial use only. As such we will plan to block embedding from your site by 12/4.  Typically we disable embedding immediately but given that you just launched, we want to give you some time to transition. In the place of the embeds, we can offer you is a site map feed that links back to Hulu for video playback and includes several useful pieces of metadata in a feed. It includes video titles, descriptions, thumbnails, video type, duration info, season number, episode number, air date, expiration date, in addition to the video link on Hulu.com. It is updated every few hours: http://www.hulu.com/video_sitemap.index.xml

Rippol responded with they will never put ads in or around Hulu content.
Hulu responded:
Ad placement would be more relevant to the "non-commercial" part of the TOS vs. the "personal" part. While you may not plan to place ads near our content, Rippol is a commercial business in the sense that you plan to make money from the content service you create. Thus our content on your site is being used for commercial purposes, even if it is indirect (i.e. you attract users with Hulu content but only monetize other content).Note we are not singling out Rippol as we have transitioned other premium video aggregators to our site map feed.

From: Hulu Gets Ripped Out Of Rippol

When Hulu was announced in 2007, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker said that Hulu would aim to have "ubiquitous distribution." The press release issued at the time said that Hulu "will actively seek agreements with a variety of additional distribution partners." The release also stated that each "distribution partner will feature the site?s content in an embedded player customized with a look and feel consistent with each site, making the offering organic to each destination."

Stats for video streaming.

Top U.S. Online Video Content providers by videos viewed
October 2009

Site	videos	% share
Google Sites including Youtube	10,524,187,000	37.7
Hulu	855,559,000	3.1
Microsoft sites	450,957,000	1.6
Fox Interactive Media	446,396,000	1.6
Viacom Digital	407,205,000	1.5
Yahoo Sites	338,035,000	1.5
Turner Network	288,070,000	1.0
CBS Interactive	255,124,000	0.9
Facebook.com	245,422,000	0.9
ABC Television	203,512,000	0.7
Total	27,942,066,000	100.0

from comScore Video Metrix



Hulu U.S. video streams soar almost 50% in October, Google’s YouTube flat

Download flash streaming web video content.

http://www.applian.com/  record/download/rip
 

You can capture Hulu videos, record Skype calls, Record Sirius™ and XM™ Radio, download streaming video clips from Windows Media™, Real™ and Flash™ formats.



They have 2 product of interest:
Replay Capture Suite & Replay Media Catcher


With Replay Media Catcher


Download media from Flash Video, Windows Media and Wowza servers, including any site that uses the HTTP, HTTPS, MMS, RTSP, and RTMP protocols. Replay Media Catcher does not support Adobe Secure RTMP Measures.
For capturing online video, you can download videos from millions of popular places, including:

• YouTube™
• MySpace™
• Daily Motion
• iFilm™
• Metacafe™
• TV Show sites.
• Movie sites.

For a complete list see http://applian.com/recording_solutions/show_RCAT.php 

Online Video Surges: 11.2 Billion Video Streams in July

FROM: http://mashable.com/2009/08/13/nielsen-july-video/

We thought that online video usage growing by 53 percent was impressive back in May. New numbers released today from Nielsen really put that growth into perspective though.
According to the information and media company, online video usage continued to see strong month-over-month and year-over-year growth. In fact, online video is still ballooning at a current rate of 31% per year in the US. That translates to 11.2 billion total streams in July alone.
That’s nearly double the population of the entire world. Let that sink in for a moment: two videos for every person on the planet, and all of these views were generated just inside the US.

That isn’t the only eye-popping number to come out of Nielsen today, either. There were 135.9 million unique viewers of online video in the last month. If you do the math, that means that the average viewer watched 82.4 streams in July. The numbers also indicate that the average viewer watched online video for 211 minutes during the month. Here’s the data:

+-------------------------+------------+-----------+------------+
|                         |   Jul-09   | Year-Over | Month-Over |
|                         |            |   -Year   |   -Month   |
+-------------------------+------------+-----------+------------+
| Unique Viewers (000)    |  135,977   |   14.2%   |    1.2%    |
| Total Streams (000)     | 11,200,093 |   31.4%   |   11.1%    |
| Streams per Viewer      |    82.4    |   15.1%   |    9.7%    |
| Time per Viewer (min)   |   211.6    |   42.2%   |   12.1%    |
+-------------------------+------------+-----------+------------+

When you break down online video by service, there are a few surprises. First, the obvious one: YouTube was #1 with 7 billion total streams and about 104 million unique viewers. Hulu was second with 383.7 streams, but with only 10.3 million viewers. That translates to the average Hulu user watching 37 clips or TV shows in July. Clearly Hulu is able to engage users, but it still doesn’t have the reach of YouTube, or even of Yahoo (265 million streams, 30 million viewers) or MSN/Microsoft (188 million streams, 17.8 unique viewers).

+-------------------------------------------------+-----------+---------+
| Video Brand                                     |   Total   | Unique  |
|                                                 |  Streams  | Viewers |
|                                                 |   (000)   |  (000)  |
+-------------------------------------------------+-----------+---------+
| YouTube                                         | 7,010,772 | 104,541 |
| Hulu                                            |  383,779  | 10,299  |
| Yahoo!                                          |  265,570  | 29,948  |
| MSN/WindowsLive/Bing                            |  187,994  | 17,790  |
| Nickelodeon Kids and Family Network             |  179,666  |  7,251  |
| Turner Sports and Entertainment Digital Network |  155,075  |  7,930  |
| Fox Interactive Media                           |  151,622  | 14,692  |
| MTV Networks Music                              |  119,101  |  6,887  |
| CNN Digital Network                             |  109,221  | 11,680  |
| Blinkx                                          |  86,398   |   268   |
+-------------------------------------------------+-----------+---------+

Online video’s growth is storming ahead. Our eyeballs might as well be glued to our computer screens.