Hulu and Livestream have you covered with New Year’s related content from around the U.S. Hulu notes, “from approximately 10 p.m. EST to 12:15 a.m. EST, we’ll be hosting a live stream direct from Times Square as the crowd counts down to the ball drop at midnight.” It looks like Hulu will provide the same coverage they did for the welcome to 2009.

Livestream will show a variety of programming beginning at 6pm Eastern tonight from around the country. They note that you can even watch the “littlest ball drop” which is located in Aggieville, Kansas. Livestream’s coverage is also available on the iPhone.

How will you ring in 2010? Leave your geeky or non-geeky suggestions in the comments.

This puts Hulu right behind Google/YouTube and Fox Interactive and moves Hulu above Yahoo, Microsoft and Viacom. To put the 380 million mark in perspective, Google including YouTube videos were viewed over 5 billion times.

comScore is also reporting that for the month of March, Google/YouTube passed 100 million unique viewers. Hulu came in with 41 million viewers which puts the online video service in the 4th slot.

Other notes from comScore include: 77.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video and the average video length was just over 3 minutes.

Do you find yourself watching a lot of videos on Hulu? To be honest I’ve only used the service when I have missed a TV show that they offer (e.g. Lost, Chuck, etc.).

Boxee co-founder Avner Ronen notes on the Boxee blog:

we just found out that Hulu blocked the boxee browser from accessing the Hulu site. this is a disappointing development since their RSS feeds are publicly available, and our browser, while optimized for a great 10 ft video experience, is no different in how it accesses this content than Internet Explorer, Firefox, Flock, Opera or any of the other browsers out there.

Boxee is down but not out – let’s see what they do next!

Update: Greg Sandoval at CBS was able to track down a Boxee employee and has some quotes regarding the service interruption.

Boxee staff does note that today’s release hasn’t gone through much testing so don’t moan if it turns your mac into a pc.

Boxee is also launching an "App Box" which allows for easy installation of new applications. They note that there’s also native support for 3rd party repositories so developers can send out apps without having to go through the main Boxee app library. I wonder if this is one of the ways Boxee will monetize…by charging for featuring certain apps.

Check out my video interview with Boxee co-founder Avner Ronen.

NY-based online video streaming provider Mogulus has setup a New Year’s Eve Times Square channel which will be live from 4pm ET tonight. They have partnered with some of the Gannett properties which will run the feed on their newspaper websites as well.

Hulu will run a live channel from Times Square beginning at 10pm ET. Hulu notes that their coverage, “will include views of Times Square and the crystal ball, plus the ambient sounds of the party as NYC winds up to count down to 2009.”

UPDATE: Check out 2010 New Year’s eve video options

Happy New Year to all of the awesome CN readers. Please be safe! 2009 looks to be a very exciting year!

SplashCast

From the release, "The SplashCast player includes full episodes and clips from various seasons of each show, as well as interviews with the show’s characters, producers, and more. Fans can even upload their own humorous photos and videos for all to see, as well as view, rate and comment on photos and videos submitted by others."

SplashCast will sell ads into the embedded players. I wonder what that experience will be like to interact with advertising in the player and then interact with advertising in the actual Hulu videos and clips.

Last month SplashCast partnered with 70 radio station websites.

Other notable facts from the report:

• YouTube passed the 100 million U.S. visitor mark for the month of October
• ESPN listed in tenth position for views – I wonder how many of those views come from their auto-launcher on the espn.com home page (hate that feature)
• All of Google’s video sites pushed out more than 5.3 billion video views for October

I actually had the opportunity to spend a week at the Food Network studios about two years ago. It’s amazing the talent that they have – from the stars in front of the camera to the massive work behind the camera. If you think it’s hard to get a movie star to do what the producer wants, just imagine what it’s like to keep a cake in perfect condition for an hour under the studio lights. The food is very pampered!

I am not sure if these Scripps Networks clips can be viewed worldwide but if they can, it would be an excellent way for Scripps to draw in a brand new set of viewers.

Check out my post about Food Network star Giada DeLaurentiis and what she can teach you about passion-centric communities.

Here’s a sample of the Food Network clips on Hulu:

There’s nothing in the Hulu privacy policy regarding the widgets and any sort of tracking. There’s also no notice of tracking on the Hulu widget page. Should there be? And more importantly, should I as the person embedding the widgets understand what it is that Hulu is tracking? Trust me, I am a tracking freak so I understand the need for Hulu to understand how and where their widgets are being used. But I’d also like to see some transparency regarding what it is that they are tracking. How can I be assured that they aren’t tracking items outside of their widget? What information isbeing passed back to Hulu from my site and more importantly, my site visitors.

I’d like to see Hulu create a checkbox that the person lifting the widget has agreed to the terms of the widget which must include what it is that Hulu is tracking.

This is a simple example of a topic which will need to be discussed as an industry at some point in the very near future. Are all widgets considered a form of advertising and ad-based rules apply? When I embed a widget on my site, what responsibilities do I and the widget source have in communicating privacy and terms with regards to the widget(s)?

I’ve written about widgets before, spoken on panels about widgets and believe that widgets will change the advertising landscape over the next year or so. From my perspective, the Hulu widgets provide little to no real value and I don’t see why a content publisher (blog, MySpace profile, whatever) would embed these widgets.

The "Hulu’s Show & Movie Widget" which I’ve embedded below forces a user away from the content site to Hulu to watch the video. It’s a bit odd considering they allow embedding the shows online and how Feng talks about hyper distribution as the model Hulu is striving for. I’d prefer to see the ability to view the video directly inside or that the widget expands to view the show. If Hulu could provide this type of widget, it would be a real winner for Hulu, the video viewer and the content site owner. If you take their full, non-customizable widget, it will play the video inside the widget. But anyone who will want to embed a Hulu widget into their site or blog, will want their favorite or related shows in the embed (like Michael did with the DailyShow).

On the flip side, this is a great marketing play – if they can get users to embed the widgets, the users will provide Hulu with all the free marketing they could ever want – even while providing no value to the site that embeds the widget. Feng says Hulu is open to feedback on the widgets – so there’s my feedback – make all of the widgets play inside of the widget for maximum effectiveness.

comScore

Here are the other notes from comScore for May 2008:

• 74 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 228 minutes of video.
• 82.2 million viewers watched 4.1 billion videos on YouTube.com (50.4 videos per viewer).
• 54.8 million viewers watched 703 million videos on MySpace.com (12.8 videos per viewer).
• 6.8 million viewers watched 88 million videos on Hulu.com (13.0 videos per viewer).
• The duration of the average online video was 2.7 minutes.

YouTube will always come in with a higher video/user count because most of their videos are short, user-generated and are typically unplanned while sites like Hulu are longer shows and are typically planned.

Ashkan says more videos were watched than searches were performed.

Here are the presenters:

1. Hulu – Kevin McGurn, VP National Sales (our coverage) — Michael has an article today about Hulu’s ad rates
2. Move Networks – Bob Bryson, SVP Sales & BD
3. Boxee – Avner Ronen, Co-founder & CEO
4. MediaMerx – Tejpaul Bhatia, Co-founder & CEO
5. Visible Measures – Matt Cutler, VP Marketing & Analytics (our coverage)

If you want to jump around in the video, click play, then pause and wait for the loading bar to finish, then you can jump, jump around.

"Already the business model is proving itself, which is we support the service through advertising and there’s a strong enough demand that we are actually getting higher rates than on broadcast, specifically even in primetime tv…advertising is sold on a CPM basis and we are very fortunate to be in a position that the advertising bought on Hulu is even higher than that on primetime."

"The common thread between the two is that Amazon is one of the best companies in the world at focusing on the user experience. And that’s exactly what Hulu is, in obsessed as well. That’s what gets us out of bed in the morning, why we show up to work and often times stay until 3 AM in the morning."

Perhaps Kilar has been reading the also LA-based Calacanis Employee Manual.

Hulu is capitalizing on the SuperBowl by not only displaying all of the commercials from the game, but also selling a sponsorship against them! This might be the first time that a commercial sponsors a commercial.

Here is the currently highest rated SuperBowl ad – it’s with Justin Timberlake for Pepsi.

AOL and MSN were the first partner Web sites to feature hulu content. Today I noticed for the first time that AOL is pushing hulu to its software customers — those who use the full AOL application (and yes, I do use the AOL application). The link appears within the mail function and normally the link (in purple) is for an ad partner.

When you click on the graphic, it takes you to AOL Video and directly into the Hulu section. It’s a smart move by AOL to start to move its base of customers into hulu through AOL Video where they can monetize the videos beyond the in-video ads provided by hulu. The only suggestion I have for AOL is to remove the hulu name and just promote the shows and clips as AOL Video content. It’s not the same as noting "CBS" on a panel of content.