The Business of Live Media

I have been a beta tester for the site Hulu.com. The much hyped joint venture between NBC and Fox. I have been looking forward to being a beta tester.

Here is my brief overview. Hulu is the on demand long form media website done right (almost). Hulu.com understands that people who consume internet media do so in a different way than people who watch traditional TV. YouTube was the first to understand this concept but it looks like this will be their first true competitor in this space. Professional content distributed to the masses with no barriers is what internet users are demanding. From a functional standpoint, Hulu has done their homework and created an easy to use video application. The entire site is straightforward and you can quickly get to what you want to watch. There is nothing to download and it is as simple as click to watch.

What Hulu understands is how the lean forward audience watches online media. This consumer wants to control the entire experience. Hulu embraces the open social concept but stops short. While the user gets to control just about everything, the users hands are tied once it comes to group socialization.

Hulu does a great job with various distribution options. The most powerful form of distribution is that the user doesn’t have to watch the content on the Hulu.com site. Finally somebody gets it. Companies are starting to realize they should not control the entire experience and to let the user share this content the way they want. The result is a user that will want even more of your content.

What we are finally seeing is the transformation to an open system of video distribution.

The content provided is not bad. Obviously, NBC and Fox’s lineup are a great start and they go a little farther. Shows from FX, Sci Fi, Sundance, Fuel TV, E, Bravo and USA Networks. Even a selection from Universal fills out the list.

Unfortunately Hulu will only make the most recent five episodes of the current series available. I believe this will quickly change. Would NBC rather me watch an older episode of the Office or give me the opportunity to go elsewhere? It is hard enough to attract a user. Why give them a reason to leave.

-- I took a screen shot of the The Office so you can see what it looks like.

Breakdown of the options:

Flash – Streamed using Flash 9 using H.264. Quality is pretty good.

Navigation – This is another highlight. You don’t have to drag that slider around to find what you are looking for. The timeline shows a line in it

Share – It has the typical email to a friend form. What is interesting is you can resize the clip to only what you want the person to see. It also gives you the ability to preview what you are resizing before sending it out. Good concept.

Feedback – Let’s you report problems for the player or show.

Comments are great. I am glad they don’t censor out the negative comments. Makes it real.

Full Screen – On the full-screen mode, the video quality was sharp without stuttering (480kbps or 700kbps depending on your bandwidth.) You can leave comments under the player.

Pop Out – This is one of the major keys to the success of Hulu. You can have the video pop up in a separate small window and view it while working on other stuff. This is a great feature not even done by the standard of online video YouTube.

Embed -- The embed feature is a very important step forward for online distribution. You can embed their shows right on your webpage. We knew this was going to happen one day and it is good to see NBC and Fox make this leap first. I copied the code and put it right on a Blog. It was seamless and the mini player is great. This is what we need to focus on for 2008.

Details – Gives you all of the information about the show.

Rate – The typical 5 star click to rate system.

Advertisements. –Thankfully no prerolls. The worst form of advertisement is prerolls. The idea is to adjust the amount of advertising to the length of the clip. But in the end, of course, the ads will be much less intrusive and not as lengthy as TV. Also, when you click on the ad it is a popup window. The vast majority of us have popup blocker so we don’t see the ad. This bug I am sure will be fixed in the future.

Bugs – There are still some bugs when using FireFox. For example you can’t scroll between clips. Kinda a bummer but you can easily get around it.

All in all, Hulu is a very slick video presentation site with a good variety of TV shows to start. I’d rather watch a NBC or Fox show on Hulu than the respective networks’ sites — Hulu’s user experience is better, and everything loads and plays very quickly. Beyond that, Hulu is lacking user uploads, downloads and complete social networking applications. Hulu has raised the bar for internet video delivery and the users will be the winners.