At first glance, music might seem to be a saturated market on the web. Sites like Last.fm have music suggestions, artists profile, and communities covered, the iTunes and Amazon music stores make purchasing a breeze, and music videos can be found littered across Youtube and many other sites.

It’s time to make room for one more, and it has the potential to be big. Pluggedin, a music video and community site that sees itself as a Hulu for music, has just launched in public beta. The site’s biggest selling point is its high quality video content, featuring music videos from labels including EMI, Sony BMG, and Universal Music Group, along with a number of independent labels. Pluggedin is hoping to add the last of the ‘big four’ labels, Warner Music, in the near future.

The Hulu comparison is an apt one. The site is very clean, video quality is generally much better than what’s found on Youtube, and the amount of content is impressive, though there are some noticeable gaps. At launch the site features over 10,000 available videos, but most of them are not available in true HD quality (largely because existing footage is not hi-def). Pluggedin hopes that as the site gains popularity, content providers will have a greater incentive to film music videos in HD.

Pluggedin does a good job integrating with other sites on the web. Users are provided with direct links to Amazon and iTunes if they’d like to purchase a video or song they’ve just listened to. And the site has formed a number of partnerships with merchandisers, including Hot Topic for clothing and Thumbplay for mobile ringtones. All of this is presented in unobtrusive menus that don’t detract from the experience at all.

The site also features profiles for over a million musicians, including those that don’t have any videos on the site. Profiles are dynamically generated using content from a number of sources, including All Music Guide, Last.FM, and Wikipedia. And while these pages don’t feature any ‘HD-quality’ material, they do provide a list of each artist’s music videos found elsewhere on the internet, all of which play seamlessly in the page.

Despite all of these features, the site still has a few issues. Searching for specific videos can be tricky - it seems that users can only search by artist name, not song title. And for a site that promotes its video quality, there are surprisingly few videos available in HD at launch (though this is mostly a fault of content providers). And videos cannot be embedded into other sites, a major obstacle standing in the way of viral growth. And the biggest issue of all: Videos are not viewable outside of the U.S. and Canada.

The social networking aspect is minimal, but sufficient for sharing music between friends. It’s a great timewaster - clicking through random music has never been this fun. And the playlist feature be will great for impromptu parties. As long as PluggedIn continues to add content and doesn’t go overboard with their ads, this site will be one to watch.

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Hulu has started offering the above box to international users visiting the site from outside of the United States, the first sign that the service may soon be available in more countries than one.

First spotted by Watch TV Online, the region drop down box preferences Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia above all other countries, suggesting that they might be the first outside of the United States with Hulu access.

I spoke with Eric Feng, the CTO of Hulu briefly when Mark interviewed him back in January and I asked him about international distribution then. Mark wrote the response up as:

Hulu is working on providing its videos internationally but content rights issues will take time to work through. Eric couldn’t provide any time table for when we might see Hulu available internationally

I do recall Eric saying that Hulu was keen on rolling out international access, and the only thing holding them back was the rights holders, but given a chance they’d press the button tomorrow.

In the mean time, read this post on how to access Hulu now from outside of the United States.

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CBS released a high definition player today in the labs area of their site, along with a few clips. They are currently streaming (not progressive download) in H.264/AVC format at 480p, with 720p and 1080p coming soon, they say.

Hulu and others are also beginning to test high definition streaming. Some shows on Hulu, for example, are optionally available in 480p format. They also have a few clips available in 720p.

Update: We’ve had a chance to speak with Eric Feng, the CTO of Hulu, about how this CBS announcement compares to the video quality provided by Hulu.

Hulu currently provides three levels of quality: 360p, 480p, and 720p. The first two levels are streamed whereas the third is progressively downloaded. Since CBS has yet to stream anything above 480p, these new tests are nothing extraordinary…yet. However, even if CBS begins to stream 720p or higher, consumers might not see much benefit. According to Feng, the median broadband download rate in the US is 1.9mb/sec and high definition video (ordinarily considered 720p or higher on the web) consumes 2.5mb/sec. So if CBS tries streaming 720p, they’d probably run into lots of buffering issues.

We should note that 480p and 720p are not available for all videos on Hulu. Only a certain selection of movies are available in 480p and only very few samples are available in 720p. Hulu doesn’t currently plan to deploy 1080p because it takes up too much bandwidth and processing power.

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It hasn’t been hard for people to watch the cult favorite show South Park (possibly the best show on television) online. Sites like Allsp (All South Park) have had the entire catalog available for some time. And episodes are always available on BitTorrent immediately after broadcast.

Instead of fighting BitTorrent and sites like Allsp, South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker are simply going to try to make them irrelevant by offering something better. Along with Comedy Central, they’ve expanded South Park Studios, where viewers can stream any episode of South Park from the show’s twelve seasons. The joint venture was announced last year, but added whole episode viewing today.

The main benefits: quality is significantly better than the clips on Allsp, and are searchable. Of course, there’s also no question about copyright infringement when you watch shows on the sanctioned site. The downside is that the episodes are not embeddable (although clips like the one above are), and there are ads includes in the streams.

Revenues from the joint venture are being split 50/50 between Comedy Central and Stone/Parker.

The viewing experience is very similar to Hulu. But the fact that the entire catalog of episodes is available makes the site much more attractive. Hulu only shows the last few episodes of any particular show, so new viewers are unable to start from the beginning. If Hulu wants to be the long term default library for online television, they need to work out licensing deals that allow them to upload all historical shows, too.

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No one can say they didn’t see this one coming: Hulu will finally open up to the public this week, on Wednesday to be precise and yes, it’s official.

The company’s been in private beta for 4.5 months. If you haven’t managed to snag one of the many invitations floating around, you’re probably thinking “big deal”. But as I expressed in my initial review, Hulu’s a remarkable web service despite its numerous shortcomings (no downloads, a limited collection of shows and movies, and no international access to name a few).

Hulu is also announcing the addition of new content from Warner Brothers Television Group, Lionsgate, NBA, NHL and twenty other content providers (including the Onion News Network!).

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If yesterday’s cushy article on Hulu in Fortune is any indication, Internet TV site Hulu is getting ready to leave private beta and launch to the public. Press like this doesn’t just happen without the company asking for it. They’re preparing for the big show.

Hulu was expected to launch this month anyway, and the article mentions an “early March” release. And apparently they’re gathering analysts for a Monday briefing.

And as much as I respect both of the writers (David Kirkpatrick and Adam Lashinsky), the article is way too generous in its portrayal of Hulu and its history. An example quote: “But the secret of Hulu’s initial success - the thing that made believers out of the skeptics - is the power and simplicity of the website itself.” Another: “The result is the elegantly transparent interface that has wowed even its biggest detractors.” Fortune seems very appreciative to get this exclusive level of access. While they mention that bloggers were highly critical of Hulu prior to launch, they fail to talk about the very good reasons behind that criticism.

Good thing I’m here to remember.

Hulu: A Very Troubled Start

In the months following the company’s March 2006 initial press release, we gave the joint venture a lot of grief for failing to pick a name for the project, eventually settling on a name - Hulu - that meant “cease” and “desist” in Swahili (ironic, given that Hulu’s parent companies send out so many of them), copying Google’s mission statement, and receiving not the greatest vote of confidence from NBC Universal’s own chief digital officer (one of the joint venture partners).

Behind all of this criticism was a high degree of doubt that NBC and News Corp. were ever going to get Hulu out the door before the joint venture became irrelevant. In September, NBC had even announced a video downloading service that appeared to cannibalize its own joint venture with News Corp.

But all that changed when we saw the beta product. Hulu did a lot of things right. The video quality was acceptable. The controls were intuitive. And there was some great content on the site, including a few movies and some archived television shows.

So yeah, we changed our tune on Hulu once the product actually launched, but that’s the point. The product spoke for itself. Two months ago, users even voted Hulu the top video startup award at the Crunchies, beating out Joost and others.

Here We Go Again?

The problem with Hulu was the sheer amount of hype and unfulfilled expectations the company generated a full eight months before it went into private beta. Early messaging was terrible (a focus on respecting copyright, and the fact that they were creating what they called “the largest advertising platform on earth.” instead of talking about user features). A product was promised by Summer 2007 but was delayed repeatedly. Eventually they had to acquire a Chinese startup to get to the finish line.

The product still has issues - I regularly find that streaming is jumpy, for example. That shouldn’t happen at all given their resources, and certainly not in a controlled private beta. They have also been very slow to get archived content on the site - even though it would have been a great way to fight the writer’s strike that resulted in an absolute halt to any new stuff. People outside the U.S. still can’t view the content.

In short, Hulu is far from perfect. And if the Fortune article is a signal of a new round of hype around the service, don’t be surprised when bloggers criticize them for not meeting those sky high expectations. And it’s not too late to start calling this thing Clown Co. again.

My suggestion would be to skip all the hoopla this time and let the product speak for itself. Burn those marketing and PR dollars on a few more servers to keep the streaming steady. Don’t hold analyst briefings. And let the users find you because their friends can’t stop talking about how great the service is. See here for an example of how that’s done.

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New figures from Nielsen’s new VideoCensus product reveal that women prefer mainstream media video content online, where as men prefer user generated content.

According to Ars Technica, the figures show women aged 18 to 34 were twice as likely as men of the same age group to watch network TV shows streamed from sites such as CBS.com or Hulu, where as men aged 18 to 34 were over twice as likely to check out user-generated video sites as women (YouTube and others.) The figures relate only to streamed content, and therefore excludes iTunes and downloaded content from P2P services such as BitTorrent.

Even if we discount the figures fully (Ars suggests men are more comfortable with BitTorrent therefore MSM content is not counted correctly) its a strange anomaly. Why would women prefer professional content and men preferred user content? and is it possible to obtain an answer without being completely sexist in a conclusion?

No doubt Nielsen and competing services will test the theory in the coming months. If it’s proven to be true, it may well affect the focus of sites in both spaces, and will most definitely affect the types of advertisers these sites attract.

(image credit: icanhascheezburger)

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Update: Hulu has provided 2,000 more invites for our readers. Get yours here.

I had the chance yesterday to sit down with Eric Feng, the CTO of Hulu, to discuss how things have gone during its private beta and where the service is heading in 2008. Here are some of the things I learned:

• The first line of code was written on August 6th, less than 3 months before Hulu debuted in private beta, and almost five months after the joint venture was first announced.
• Eric joined Hulu on July 15th, only a few weeks before development began, bringing with him the entire engineering team from Chinese video startup Mojiti (turns out the rumor we reported was correct).
• Hulu has about 30 developers, half of which are based in Beijing and focused on the site’s design and functionality, the other half of which are based in Southern California and deal with operations, advertising, etc.
• Hulu currently has “several hundred thousand users” who have submitted “tens of thousands” of feedback messages.
• The public launch should come in the next couple of months, probably around the end of March.
• Hulu’s private beta has been a technical one, as the developer team has had to work on stabilizing the service while sorting through feedback from testers and improving the user interface (search has been enhanced in particular).
• Hulu is built on Ruby on Rails.
• High definition video will be rolled out gradually over the coming year with more and more content; the company believes that 2008 will be a year when online video companies start focusing less on convenience and more on quality.
• Hulu has tripled its amount of content since private beta launch, with many episodes of shows going back to the first seasons, not just the last five that have aired on TV.
• Hulu is not only a place to view Hulu-hosted video but one to find video hosted elsewhere on the net; the service actually scrapes ABC’s websites so that it can provide deep links to that network’s content.
• RSS feeds have been added so users can keep track of new content added to the site.
• The company is experimenting with different forms of advertising, including overlay ads and trailers for movies.
• As far as sites like OPENhulu go, Hulu will address them on a case-by-case basis. The company seems most concerned about protecting its brand (the use of the name “hulu” in “OPENhulu” is problematic) and protecting the brands of its content providers. In regards to the latter point, Hulu actually has a blacklist of sites where people can’t embed videos. These are mainly sites that host content, such as pornography, that content providers don’t want their content displayed alongside. In general, Hulu can monitor where people embed its videos, and it withholds the right to deactivate any embeds. That said, it strongly supports the syndication of its content across the web.
• Nearly 85% of Hulu’s library is viewed everyday at least once.
• Hulu is working on providing its videos internationally but content rights issues will take time to work through. Eric couldn’t provide any time table for when we might see Hulu available internationally (if you don’t want to wait, see Duncan’s post).
• Downloads might come in the long term, but they are not something that Hulu is focusing on currently.
• And finally, “Hulu” actually comes from either of two Chinese interpretations. It could mean “interactive recording” (Hu + Lu), or it could mean a Chinese gourd that holds precious things. That company prefers the latter (they certainly don’t prefer our Swahili interpretation).

Our initial review of Hulu can be found here.

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I can remember when OpenHulu launched thinking that the name was nearly false advertising; essentially it provided access to Hulu content away from Hulu, but only to those in the United States. Veoh and MSN have since followed suit and provide Fox and NBC content from Hulu on their sites, but like OpenHulu it still remains IP blocked to those outside of the United States (and possibly Canada).

Web based proxies have been around for a long time, but most don’t work with video, and even those that do don’t provide decent enough bandwidth from which to view content from sites such as Hulu.

One alternative service that has been in use for business for a long time now are Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). VPN’s offer a secure pipe from where you can access the web, and in turn disguise the location of the user on the end connection.

There’s quite a few paid VPN services available, many at reasonable cost ($5-$20/ mth were a few I found on Google) but one service doing the rounds at the moment offers a VPN connection for free.

HotSpot Shield is a plugin for Windows or OS X that offers a free VPN service. There is a catch, it rather annoyingly adds a banner ad to the top of every page you visit, but at the ultimate price point of $0 most people will be able to live with it…well, at least whilst getting access to sites that were currently blocked, and the ads can be switched off on each page, but only after they have appeared.

Does it work? From Western Australia I’m currently listening to Pandora for the first time since May (still a great service.) Earlier this weekend I caught up with a new Simpsons episode, complete with ads from Hulu, then watched archival footage of the Nixon Resignation just for good measure. The only thing it didn’t work on was Joost which told me I should stop using a proxy…no matter, the blocked stuff is mostly on CBS.com anyway, and yes CBS.com works as well.

The speed wasn’t always great, but it was enough to watch video, varying between 600kbps and 1.3mbps on my 2mbps Cable connection.

I hesitated in writing this post because the more people who use services such as HotSpot Shield, the more chances we might end up killing them, or worse still Hulu and others might get smart and find ways of blocking it. Even if we lose HotSpot Shield today I’m betting given the strong demand services like this will have that others will offer VPN services as well, and hopefully free ones at that. At least I hope so, now I have Pandora again I’m really going to struggle if I’m forced to give it up again

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Today, video Website Veoh.com is adding more videos from traditional TV networks, including NBC (The A-Team, The Office, Heroes), Fox (The Simpsons, Family Guy, 24), the Sci-Fi Channel (Battlestar Galactica), the USA Network (Monk), and FX (Damages). All of this new content comes from Hulu, the NBC-Fox joint venture. CBS content was already on the site through a previous deal, but now all videos from traditional TV networks can be found under a new “TV Shows” tab on its main page today, which replaces the “Series” tab. (Video series can now be found in the “Channels” tab).

Founder Dmitry Shapiro tells me this is part of his strategy to turn Veoh into a “hyper-aggregator” of video on the Web, something he already does with his downloadable client, VeohTV, which can show (and download) Flash video from anywhere on the Web. Now he is embedding video players from other sites, such as Hulu, on Veoh.com proper. Says Shapiro:

That is the tip of the strategy—to become the hyper-aggregator. We will continue to provide a breadth of content. Embedding third-party players will be extended to other offerings, including other video-sharing sites.

He even plans on adding videos from rivals YouTube and MetaCafe because he thinks the way to survive is to become the one place where people can find videos from allover the Web. Shapiro also shared some internal stats with me.

—From November, 2006 to November, 2007 worldwide unique monthly visitors to Veoh.com grew 760 percent from 2.5 million to 21.5 million. (comScore measures 3.5 million in the U.S. and 13.4 million worldwide for November, 2007. Quantcast measures 6.7 million in the U.S., and 18.4 million worldwide).
—In November, 2007, Veoh served more than 30 million hours of videos.
—The average user watches 80 minutes per month, even with advertising.
—VeohTV has 2.5 million active viewers (also, as of November).
—Only 40 percent of Veoh’s audience is in the U.S.
—40 percent watch during early evening and during prime time (i.e., Veoh is stealing attention away from traditional TV).

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