Microsoft announced another down quarter this morning. Revenues in the September quarter were down 14 percent to $12.92 billion, and net profits declined even further to $3.57 billion, or $0.40 a share. The consensus estimate was $0.32, so Wall Street is happy and the shares are rallying (up 10 percent in early-morning trading).

Investors will forgive the poor performance coming out of the recession (are we out of that yet?), because they hope that yesterday’s launch of Windows 7 will bring back the shine to the stock. If you look at revenues for the Windows business, it certainly looks like both businesses and consumers have been delaying purchases and upgrades in anticipation of the new operating system. The Windows business saw revenues decline by 37 percent, or $1.7 billion, from last year, to $2.6 billion. The closely-related Business division, which includes Office, was down $500 million in revenues, to $4.4 billion.

Microsoft needs to revive these franchises with Windows 7 at a time when it is increasingly under attack by cloud-based productivity apps from Google and others. (Earnings slides after the jump).

VEVO, the YouTube-powered “Hulu for music videos” which to date was a joint venture between Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, is gaining a new founding shareholder.

VEVO has just announced a ’strategic’ investment was made by Abu Dhabi Media Company (ADMC), a giant of a media company with headquarters in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, reports MediaMemo. The specifics of the deal remain under cover, but the rumor mill suggests the company is being valued at around $300 million.

Last May, Hulu launched a new project as part of its alien plot to rot our brains with premium content. Dubbed Hulu Labs, the site now offers experimental new features that users can play around with before they’re ready for prime-time. At launch these included thing like time-based browsing and recommendations, and today, Hulu is launching two new additions to Labs: Publisher Tools and a Linux version of Hulu Desktop.

A large number of web services are geographically restricted, such as Hulu, Pandora and Spotify. The reasons are usually to do with content licensing restrictions, or because US visitors (or visitors from other advanced economies) are of a higher value from a monetization perspective. A web application can only guess at the location of a visitor based on an IP address and other information, such as browser language and regional settings.

IP addresses are mapped to countries (and in some instances, further to states and cities) using large commercial datasets such as GeoIP from Maxmind, which is a ‘best guess’ database based on data it has collected (how, I would rather not know). The system is accurate enough to enable services to block on a country level, but often fail at a more local level.

There is no love lost between CBS and Hulu. You won’t find any full episodes of CBS shows on Hulu, and CBS’s own site TV.com is so similar in look and feel that one might call it a product of envy. So it should come as no surprise that the knives are still out for Hulu at CBS Interactive.

An email with an article critical of Hulu from CBS Interactive CEO Quincy Smith that was passed around internally (excerpted below) landed in our inbox. Smith confirms that the email is real. Earlier today, he passed along an article from Contentinople titled “Execs Rip Hulu for Giving Away Content” which quotes media executives on a panel laying into Hulu for giving away TV shows for free. The panelists in the article also praise the cable industry’s proposed TV Everywhere model which will make TV shows and movies available online only to consumers who are already existing cable TV subscribers and can be authenticated as such.

Smith passed along the entire article to his executive team, along with a note wondering “how hard it would be to prove that some ratings declines are a result of reckless hulu streams.” CBS’s ratings for the Fall Season premiers have been doing relatively well, compared to other networks. The implication Smith seems to be making here is that maybe the other networks are down because their audience is going online. If he could prove that, it would make his strategy of shunning Hulu look smart.

More and more television content is making its way online. But because of different deals by various networks, it’s all over the place. Even the huge sites like Hulu, only skim the surface in showing what is out there. Clicker, a service launching today at TechCrunch50, wants to be the most comprehensive way to find the video content you’re looking for on the web.

While there are no shortage of video search engines out there, Clicker believes its offering is superior because it creates a structured database of programming, organizing shows by things like network, genre, and show name. This type of data not only allows for better search results, but it allows you to browse content without having to do text-based searches, which you probably won’t be doing when television and future web-enabled tablets start to serve up this content. Clicker already has a deal with Boxee.

Analytics firm comScore has just released its latest statistics for video streaming sites in the United States for the month of June, and at first glance the results are quite surprising: the top video sites have seen a major shakeup, with many of the top sites abruptly falling in the rankings.

The cause, of course, is the Michael Jackson effect — media organizations around the world dedicated huge amounts of coverage to the pop star’s tragic death on June 25, and many people turned to the web to learn more. Other breaking news that month, including the Iranian election controversy, also likely contributed to the growth seen by news properties.

Hulu, which has ranked as the third most popular video site in the United States for the past few months, has dropped down to seventh. Likewise, Fox Interactive Media, which includes MySpace, has dropped from second to fifth.

It’s no secret that summer is the season of terrible television, when networks flock to broadcast cheap reality TV and game shows that actually will turn your brain into a slippery pile of goo. Granted, there are a few gems out there (particularly on the cable networks), but for the most part TV fans are out of luck during the dog days of summer. At least, that’s the way things used to be.

Earlier this week I had something of an epiphany. Hulu, with its mountains of movies and prime-time TV shows, is the perfect answer to the summer doldrums. I’m finally free to catch up on those shows that my friends have been talking about for years, or at least watch the first few episodes of a show to see if it’s worth buying on iTunes or DVD. Eureka!

Unfortunately, when I went to catch up on a few shows the other night, I fell prey to a problem that’s nagged the site since it launched: content owners frequently impose bizarre restrictions on which content you’re allowed to watch on Hulu. The number of episodes available for each show vary wildly, and serial dramas will sometimes only offer a smattering of episodes scattered across a season, which makes it impossible to follow the story line. Hulu does its best to explain the situation to users with messages like “We are able to run five trailing episodes of this series”, but these bulletins don’t do much to ameliorate the frustration and apparent lack of logic.

It’s not often that we hear about consumer web startups getting their own TV spots, much less during the Super Bowl — that’s the sort of craziness that was reserved for the heady 90’s, back before the (first) bubble burst. But that’s exactly what Hulu did this year when it ran a spot during Super Bowl XLIII, introducing the masses to the online video site’s plot for world domination (headed by Alec Baldwin, of course). The ad was certainly effective — Hulu saw a massive traffic jump and released a series of followup ads featuring celebrities including Seth MacFarlane and Dennis Leary.

Apparently the general public wasn’t alone in liking the ad. Hulu has just been nominated for an Emmy Award in the category “Outstanding Commercial” — a feat that few other consumer websites have ever accomplished (I believe the only other startup to get a nod was Snap.com in 1999, when that site was home to a search engine).

Last April, Hulu made the major announcement that The Walt Disney Company had acquired an equity stake in the online video site. Up until that point, Hulu’s original investors News Corp and NBC were the site’s primary content providers, making for an impressive but still somewhat limited selection. The Disney deal opens doors to an entirely new library of content for Hulu to distribute, ranging from movies from the Disney library to prime-time ABC shows, but for the last two months we’ve had to wait for the catalog to make its way online. Tonight, we’re beginning to see the fruits of the deal.

Beginning this evening Hulu now features Grey’s Anatomy, a very popular prime-time medical drama that’s sure to be a crowd-pleaser. The episode selection for the show is pretty sparse right now — you have five episodes from the most recent fifth season to choose from (with large gaps in between each) but we may well see the selection rotate through the summer. Hulu plans to release more ABC shows over the next two weeks, which will include Desperate Housewives, Ugly Betty, Scrubs, and I Survived a Japanese Game Show.

It’s sad to see a company that we were all so excited about fade further into oblivion. Today Joost, one of the most anticipated startups in 2006/2007, is just an also ran in a sea of big online video sites like YouTube and Hulu. Today CEO Mike Volpi stepped down, the company is laying off most of staff, and refocusing the business to “white label online video platforms for media companies.”

Om has a good monday morning quarterback overview of why they failed, but to me it comes down to just a few things. They over funded ($45 million before they even launched) and they ignored the fact that users were quite willing to sacrifice quality in online video for the convenience of Flash in the browser. Joost waited until late last year to go all Flash – until then users had to use the downloadable Joost software and allow P2P streaming of shows. In the meantime there was no linking to Joost videos. YouTube and Hulu got all that social media and SEO juice that could have gone to Joost.

Founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who founded Skype and Kazaa, see the world in terms of P2P and downloadable clients. The joke about how everything looks like a nail if you’re a hammer is very true with Joost. But what worked with Kazaa and Skype a decade ago doesn’t work with online video in today’s world, obviously.

YouTube has launched a new directory for movie trailers. While YouTube has had movie trailers on its site from distributors in the past, Google’s video-sharing site has launched a new channel where official trailers are organized by “Latest,” “Popular,” “In Theatres,” and “Opening Soon.”

Apple’s movie trailer platform has long been the most comprehensive and popular site in distributing online trailers. Hulu also provides a good amount of trailers on its site. Recently, YouTube launched a premium section with movies and TV shows from Crackle/Sony Pictures, CBS, MGM, Lionsgate, Starz, the BBC, Anime Network, Cinetic Rights Management, Current TV, Discovery, Documentary Channel, First Look Studios, IndieFlix, and National Geographic.

As we all know, advertising has been a tough nut for YouTube to crack. While a lot of videos feature overlaid ads at the bottom, some have been testing in-stream video ads that run before, during and after videos. Today, YouTube is starting to test a new way for users to interact with those ads.

On a “small percentage of videos,” you will now have the option of watching one “Promoted Video” (a video someone is paying for YouTube to promote, so yes, an ad) at the beginning of the clip, or choose to see a few different in-stream ads throughout the clip. And if you choose the one long clip beforehand, you will get to choose which clip you watch. Unfortunately, “none” is not an option.

We’ve been hearing for some time (starting with an ex-Youtube employee) that the number of video streams per day reported by Comscore, Nielsen and other metrics services way under-report on Youtube’s total video streams.

It’s hard to compare apples to apples, though. Recent Comscore data says Google/YouTube streams just under 7 billion videos per month in the U.S., up from around 5 billion/month late last year. That’s about 225 million streams a day, which still puts them well above all the next major competitors (MySpace, Hulu, Yahoo, Viacom, Microsoft, etc.). Nielsen says Google/YouTube streams 5.5 billion videos/month in the U.S.

But the real number of streams/day, we’ve now confirmed with a source at Google, is above 1.2 billion/day worldwide. That matches what we’ve heard from other sources. That pretty much means everyone on the Internet, on average, is watching one YouTube video per day.

There’s no question that Hulu has firmly established itself as one of the dominant video sites on the web. But its incredible growth seems to be dropping off, and quickly. Between January and February of this year, the site saw a 42% increase in unique U.S. visitors and 33% increase in streams. Between Feburary and March, it moved up to become the third most popular video site in the US, with a 14% growth in uniques and a 20% growth in overall streams.

The latest comScore data for Hulu, which covers the month of April, reports a much more modest 4.4% growth in overall streams, from 380 million streams in March to around 397 million in April. And its unique visitors actually went down month over month, from around 41.5 million in March to 40.1 million over the same time span.

Earlier this morning we stumbled across Hulu Desktop, an impressive new application from the popular video portal that lets you use your remote to control your Hulu experience. As it turns out, Desktop is only one of a set of new features Hulu is launching today as part of Hulu Labs, which is now live.

First, there’s Time-Based Browsing, which is the feature I’m going to be using most (aside from Hulu desktop). This allows you to see all new Hulu videos sorted by the day they appeared. Before now you could always sort individual shows in order, but if you missed a night of prime time it was up to you to figure out which shows you’d missed. Now you can just jump to that date under Time-Based Browsing and Hulu will do all the work for you.

Since launching in late 2007, Hulu has done one one thing very well: it lets you watch your favorite TV shows and movies from your computer, free of charge. But aside from improving the user experience with assorted niceties like smart thumbnails, improved navigation, and social features, the site hasn’t really done anything extreme to expand its functionality. That changes today.

One of my only long standing gripes with Hulu was that it could never really replace the TV watching experience simply because you had to sit in front of your computer to control it. Boxee was the perfect solution to this, as it allowed you to control Hulu via remote through a very snazzy media center interface. But Hulu has repeatedly killed that functionality, largely at the behest of its major network investors.

There are few web services hotter than Hulu these days. It’s about to surge into the number two web video position (behind only YouTube) and it just signed a deal with Disney to give it even more great content. It’s all great — if you live in the U.S.

Outside of this country, if you’ve wanted to access Hulu, you’ve either been out of luck, or had to use a proxy server workaround. For several months, there were quite a few options that would work to trick Hulu into thinking you were trying to access it from within the U.S. even when you were not. But Hulu got smarter and started doing geo-checks at the streaming level. But still, a few virtual private network (VPN) creators like Hotspot Shield would get the job done by making your IP anonymous. Not anymore.

Hulu has just released the latest in its series of star-studded ads, this time featuring Dennis Leary in a spot called ‘The Leary Mission’. He plays an alien trying to turn humans’ brains to mush by watching TV online. In the ad he gives the following instructions: “Now I need you to take your stubby little human fingers and hit this button on Hulu. Then you can share those TV shows on your bliggety blogs and your Facey-spaceys and your Tweety pages for all of your bookwormy anti-Boobtubey friends.” How could we resist putting the ad on our own bliggety blog.

(Video after the jump).

As Hulu continues its spectacular rise (it is the No. 3 video site in the U.S. and is closing in on No. 2), it just got major buy-in from yet another major media company. Disney is now an investor, joining News Corp and NBC (along with private equity firm Providence Equity Partners). Each of the three media companies now reportedly own 27 percent of Hulu.

As the initial exclusivity for NBC and Fox content expires, Hulu will be adding Disney/ABC videos and TV shows to its distribution mix as well. Hulu is becoming the preferred distribution channel for the big media companies. And it is succeeding in attracting the fickle Web audience. This should worry YouTube, which is still casting about for a business model that will pay for its enormous storage and bandwidth costs. The media companies cannot ignore YouTube just yet, but by strengthening Hulu they can give it their best content first.