Hulu, the online video joint venture between NBC and News Corp., launched last October. Today the site has 140 free on-demand movies available to anyone (as long as they are in the U.S.) and 700 total titles (including TV). As of March 2008 they were serving 83 million monthly video streams.
Tonight the site is launching a number of new embeddable widgets that allow third party sites to add Hulu content. We’ve embedded one of the widgets, which let’s users show all episodes of a particular TV show, below (I of course chose the Daily Show).
We also used this announcement as an excuse to interview Hulu CTO Eric Feng, who joined when Hulu acquired his startup Mojiti in 2007. Feng’s team formed the backbone of the Hulu. They started coding in late summer 2007 (Feng says the first line of code was written on August 6) and had the Hulu product out the door by October.
The full interview is below. Feng also demo’s the new widgets near the end.
This is a better version of YouTube in a way. http://blabtech.blogspot.com
Well, it definitely is better than YouTube - the only complaint I have is with the distribution and not with Hulu itself but with NBC, the content owner. While they want to drive traffic to their own website (Hulu), there is no need to remove the content from other distribution systems, such as iTunes. As this articles says, “by eliminating legitimate ways of getting their content, distributors are simply losing sales and forcing consumers who may otherwise pay for their content to go to illegal methods of downloading it. “
The embeddable widgets are great news…
The embeddable Hulu widget doesn’t appear to play video unless you redirect to their website. In other words they don’t play inside the widget.
TL - http://tinyurl.com/wownews
It may just be my browser, but that widget definitely seems to cause the loading of the site to stutter.
Nice interview, those Hulu widgets look great. Now, if I could just be able to use them in other countries. It does seem like Eric is determined to make it happen.
Why its not available outside US??
Usually things like this are US only because of copyright issues.
Yes, I hate that, too.
The execs cry “bittorrent” and on the other hand they are doing Geodiscrimination.
(a term that I like to use whenever an Internet service is only available for a specific region or country)
Hoba,
It’s not just big media execs that make this call… show producers/ creators control the rights for their assets. Just give Dick Wolfe a google… he has been aggressively holding back Law and Order from the web for years now; NBC can do nothing about it.
You can watch The Daily Show outside from the US perfectly fine. My internet, however, sucks.
Terence
http://techgeek.com.au
trilogy alumni are everywhere…
This is worthless. Instead of playing the video, it links to a page where you can watch it.
I am love HULU!
hulu is the best thing that to happen in the video online streaming world.
no need to search on those hack-torrant sites.
I watch hulu movies and shows anytime i can.
Kudos for Hulu for making an OS X widget. But, it’s too bad that they didn’t follow the Apple Human Interface Guidelines when they made it. Widgets just look ugly when they don’t have the Aqua effect and OS X users are less likely to put a widget on their Dashboard when it clashes with the interface like Hulu’s does.
Heh.. Apple’s guidelines state:
Guess they missed that. I agree with what you are saying. Perhaps a player where options can be configured either on the back or with extra panels that come and go would have been more appropriate. Something like Epicurious’s Dashboard Widget which has a lot of options, but a relatively simple footprint.
It looks like they just ported the same widget over to as many different environments as they could. They didn’t even take the time to make the Dashboard icon look nice!
Great interview and very informative stuff. I really liked this, I hope you do more interviews like this with other startups. Eric really seems like a standup guy too, too bad he used to work for Microsoft.