Hulu Archive

SplashCast and Hulu have announced a new partnership today that will bring shows from Hulu into SplashCast widget video players. Basically what the partnership does is allow a person to embed a "channel" into their Facebook and MySpace profiles along with blogs which will continue to import the latest episodes and content. This keeps the content more current than an individual Hulu embed.

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.

comScore is out with their latest U.S. online video report today. Back in May comScore listed Hulu for the first top in the top 10 with 88 million videos viewed. Today Hulu has moved up in comScore’s online video report for October to sixth position with 235 million videos viewed. Pretty amazing growth for a service some called crap before Hulu actually launched.

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

Video hosting provider Hulu has announced a distribution partnership with the Food Network today. Actually the deal is with Scripps Networks who owns Food Network and will also include clips from Fine Living, HGTV and DIY. The initial batch of clips range from 2-4 minutes and most carry a 30-second pre-roll video ad. That’s some ratio of content to ad!

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:

Last night we wrote about the new set of embeddable widgets that video streaming service Hulu has launched. It sure seems like the widgets load very slowly. While watching the widget load, I noticed that they are grabbing data and pushing it to Omniture’s tracking beacon. This is the same beacon we wrote about with regards to Adobe and their potential spyware.

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)?

NewTeeVee and Techcrunch are reporting tonight on the launch of a set of embeddable widgets from Hulu. Hulu CTO Eric Feng and Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington sat down at the Techcrunch house for an interview. During the interview, Feng discusses the launch of a set of embeddable widgets. I have enjoyed using the Hulu service since their launch – it’s also growing quite well in terms of traffic and video views.

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 is out with their May online video report. No surprise here, Google still leads the pack with 35% market share. Google’s YouTube property accounts for 98% of the Google video traffic. Fox Interactive, Yahoo, Microsoft and Viacom round out the top 5. The full list is below. Surprisingly Hulu has joined the top 10 with 88 million videos viewed.

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.

This week at the NY Video 2.0 meeting, a variety of companies either demo’ed their service or provided a variety of business updates. If you are in the NYC tech or media scene, this might be the best monthly meetup to attend.

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.