Live Streaming on Hulu

I think I've seen this trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince that they were advertising on the Hulu home page, but I was curious about the ability to embed a live stream. So let's see how this works, shall we?

Naruto on Hulu

If you're ever on YouTube, Naruto is unavoidable. You've seen him, you just don't know it--Naruto is a spiky-haired blond kid with a headband and an orange jacket who looks like a cuter cross between Bart Simpson and Kenny from South Park. Until today, I had never watched this show, but Hulu just introduced an Anime channel featuring the first season of Naruto. I think it's either the canniest thing an anime distributor has done, or too little, too late.

There is probably a statistic on how much of YouTube content is actually repurposed from movies and TV and if there is, I'm guessing a quarter of that content is anime, and half of that is Naruto. It's most likely posted and viewed by kids between the ages of 10 and 20. The question is whether any of these kids will watch this on Hulu, rather than via torrents or on YouTube, which seems to be perfectly acceptable in this age group, not to mention much older kids. But if anything would draw them to Hulu, it would be this show.

One huge difference between watching the show on Hulu and seeing it on Cartoon Network is that Hulu features the original Japanese show with subtitles, whereas CN shows it dubbed into English. Depending on the kid who is watching it, this could be a plus or a minus. I know one co-worker's teen was inspired to learn Japanese because of watching anime, so the chance to listen to native speakers while reading translation might be a bonus. However, I was trying to read another web page while watching this first episode above, which is nearly impossible when you have to read subtitles, so for those kids who like to multitask, it might be a pain.

For a long time, I've wondered what the appeal of Naruto was so I watched the first episode and was pleasantly surprised that this wasn't as empty as your average episode of Pokemon. If Harry Potter were training to become a ninja instead of a wizard, you'd have Naruto. Like Harry, he's a nascently talented if misunderstood orphan who is going to a special academy to hone his skills. But the parallel is not quite right--rather than becoming popular, he's an outsider. Because of this, he's always pulling pranks to get attention, more like the Weasley Twins.

But Naruto carries a dark secret that is revealed in the first episode--the reason he's been mistreated is because, unknown to him, he's actually the vessel for a dormant demon spirit that destroyed the village many years ago (for any Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans, he's like Buffy's "sister" Dawn). Fortunately, there are still teachers and elders who believe in him and treat him without prejudice. This is most touchingly shown in the first episode when we find out that Naruto's tough teacher, Iruka Umino, lost his own parents as a youth during the demon attack and yet is committed to nuturing Naruto to be better and overcome his heritage.

Having not watched the series beyond the first episode, I wonder if it's devolved into merchandising-laden show that kids tune in for only for action sequences. But I'm a sucker for themes of forgiveness and redemption, which these first episode sets up nicely.

Now You Too Can Relive Groundhog Day Again an Again

My favorite movie of all time was added today to Hulu: Groundhog Day. Not only is it funny, it's probably the most eloquent movie about life and how we choose to live it. If you haven't seen it, it features Bill Murray as a miserable, arrogant, weatherman who must relive Groundhog Day in the town of Punxsutawney, day after day. Here's a clip:



If you have seen it, you might appreciate this analysis from Ken Sanes. You can relive Groundhog Day, until the end of August, when its run on Hulu ends.

I Called It! Dr. Horrible Available on Hulu!!!

Last week Wednesday I did a post on what might be the next step in distribution for Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog after it's limited release on the internet earlier this month. In short, I said it would be a good idea for Whedon to put it on Hulu, at least for a time, so more people could discover it rather than only releasing it on DVD and iTunes. Well, it's up there today as the featured program as soon as you arrive! Here's the best 42-minute web musical about an aspiring super-villain ever created, featuring Neal Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, and Felicia Day, with limited commercial interruptions between Acts I, II and III (hit Play, or click to view full screen).



Update: The L.A. Times says this will eventually also be licensed to MySpace, and eventually Yahoo!, AOL and others. And NewTeeVee says it will be available for just four months on Hulu.

How Many Fans Does Dr. Horrible have? L.A. Times Breaks the Story

During the week-long run of Joss Whedon's straight-to-the-internet super villain musical Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, there have been numerous articles about the plot line, but also about whether this could possibly be a new model for original shows. For those in the later category, the big question on everyone's mind was viewership--just how many fans does Whedon have? Blogger Jeff McManus recently speculated on how much the show, which was available free and streaming for only a week, will bring in via iTunes sales and how much star Neil Patrick Harris will make from the venture. His estimates of iTunes downloaders ranged from 100,000 to one million--a pretty wide range-- but we finally have some hard figures.

Reporter David Sarno got the traffic data from Whedon today and published it on his blog at the LA Times. In short:

Act One: 1,149,846 streams (but it was down part of first day, due to heavy traffic)
Act Two: 625,552 streams
Act Three: 427,785 streams

Act One was up for six days, Act Two for four, and Act Three was up for two days. I would say the numbers for act three are the most reflective of the number of unique fans who tuned in (speaking as someone who viewed act one and two a dozen times to pacify myself while waiting for the final act).

In his blog, Sarno compares DHSAB to other YouTube hits this week that have been up for comparable durations. Depending on how you look at it, it's on par, especially if you look at daily average for all three acts. Two of the top three biggest YouTube hits were associated with movies: the College movie trailer and fan reactions to The Dark Knight opening. Sarno believes these examples were successful due to corporate promotion, and is quick to mention that DHSAB's success is more impressive in that it was marketed by word of mouth among the Whedonites.

If that's the case though, I think the most apt comparison is to Smosh, which is definitely not corporate and yet had the third most popular video last week. Smosh consists of two college students, Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox, who amassed a huge following ever since they posted a Pokemon lip-dub to YouTube in 2005 (they had to remove it due to copyright issues, but you can see it here). They have since posted 52 random sketches of themselves and have 440,285 subscriptions as of today, the most of any Comedian's channel on YouTube.

Sarno said Smosh's latest video got 550,000 hits in two days. Given that this was produced by two dudes and that the video was just a trailer for an upcoming video (yes, even their videos have trailers), person for person and buck for buck Smosh has done a lot better than Whedon, who used dozens of cast and crew to produce DHSAB and spent in the low six-figures.

How is it possible that two boys could have more fans than an established player like Whedon? While Whedon may have a couple of hit shows under his belt, what he doesn't have is an established channel like Smosh does on YouTube, with thousands of subscribers that will be alerted to every move he makes--80 percent of the views on Smosh's latest video could be accounted for by those subscriptions. Granted, Whedon does have a dedicated fan base over at Whedonesque, but there is nothing like the convenience of being alerted automatically every time your fave auteur posts a new project. Along those lines, it would have been better if Horrible was a series that could build a subscriber base over time, but the WGA strike is what allowed all these actors and writers to be available, so the point is moot.

Despite similar-sized fanbases, Whedon will probably make more money than Padilla and Hecox, who subsist on Google ads and t-shirt sales. One DHSAB revenue stream is the $3.99 download at iTunes which is the only place you can still (legally) get the entire series since it was pulled off of drhorrible.com Sunday night. I think Jeff McMannus' first figure of 100,000 downloading fans is more accurate than one million, and based on his estimates, Joss has probably at least made his money back. No doubt some of Whedon's fan base will also pony up for the soon-to-be-released DVD, on which he plans to feature "Commentary: The Musical." Smosh's fans may watch free vids online, but I doubt they would ever pay for them.

Might Whedon also re-netcast Dr. Horrible, this time with ads, at a site like Hulu? DHSAB used the Hulu player merely to embed streaming video on their site, but normally Hulu is a destination in and of itself, a video portal for networks like Fox, NBC and major movie studios. As a portal, it has repeat visitors across a number of genres, something that Whedon could use to find new viewers, so I think it would be a wise move to engage Hulu if he's not already thinking about it. His hardcore fans have probably already gone to iTunes and will buy the DVD. Hulu would allow new watchers who would watch some ads rather than pay for it to casually check it out, perhaps as a recommendation after watching a clip of star Neil Patrick Harris in How I Met Your Mother.

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Hulu Goes Public

I've been beta testing Hulu since I started this blog. Although NBC has it's own streaming video site that allows embedding, Hulu allows full screen video and the ability to exerpt out clips. But what else would prompt people to actually register for the site, when so much is available without doing that little step?

Hulu finally went live today to the general public and I think the answer is movies. They started with about six during beta, but today there are 100, and there's some pretty good ones. In addition to Sideways, which was part of the beta, they've now got The Big Lebowski and The Usual Suspects.

But there are also some sideshow freaks. For instance, here's Arnold Schwarzenegger's first starring role, dubbed no less, in Hercules in New York. To see it in full screen, go to Hulu.com.

Star Trek for the Benefiber Crowd

I've talking a lot about Hulu as NBC and Fox's site for streaming video content, as well as ABC's video play, but didn't bother to comment on CBS. I don't have a favorite show on CBS, so I had no reason to check them out.

However, this Friday, CBS unlocked their vaults and started streaming the first three seasons of Star Trek, along with McGyver, The Twilight Zone, and Hawaii Five-O. their biggest cult hits from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Very smart!

The first thing I was struck by, however, was the advertising--Benefiber and Promise Active (a yogurt drink designed to lower your cholesterol). Wow, I am not their demographic, am I? Throw in some ads for prune juice and the AARP while you are at it.

But in catering to a slightly older crowd, I have to give them high marks for the user interface--this aims to be the Jitterbug of video sites. The control buttons -- Pause, Share, Volume--are huge and in text, whereas the nods to social networking-- Digg, Facebook--are accomplished via tiny icons. And by making it easy for those who may have watched these shows as youngsters and may now need reading glasses, they also make it easier for those who are viewing the video across the room.

But these shows do have some younger fans too. Hulu has the unique ability to not just let you embed whole shows in your blog, but to actually clip out excerpts and share it with friends, which is often what kids want (let me comment on the good part). Case in point, this clip entitled "Captain Kirk is a Gentleman." CBS might think about building this feature in down the road. But I have to give them props for knowing their core market.

Computer as TV

A long time ago, there was a company called WebTV that produced a box that would let you browse the internet from your TV. They never went anywhere--this was before video and broadband got big and people didn't really want to read on their TV.

My husband used to work at a company that tried to make TV more interactive (Like that knife on that cooking show? buy it here now) but it used a cable box, not the internet. Also went nowhere.

But interactive, nearly-on-demand TV is now here, thanks to video sites and the penetrance of broadband. However, based on the design of sites like Hulu and ABC's own site, the networks are thinking of their streaming video sites as a way to help viewers catch up on missed episodes alone at their desk and view clips. They should think about designing it for a viewer who is sitting 5 to 7 feet away on their couch.

Last Thursday, Lost came back for its midseason premiere, and this is exactly what I attempted to do. Last Friday night, my husband and I put our laptop on an end table across from the couch, hooked it up to the speakers, went to ABC Full Episode Player, and hit play. This actually worked pretty well, except that we had to keep hitting a button to advance beyond the commercials that popped up. This got less annoying when I suggested we hook up our wireless mouse so we could do this from the couch, but even so, was sometimes hard to read the text--fortunately, all I needed to do was click on one button in a consistent location.

Then I watched Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles from the couch on Hulu. Earlier I commented that Hulu seems to have been built more for embedding videos on websites and blogs than for having users to come to the site itself and view videos.

That might have been a little harsh, but now I have another criti--err, suggestion. I realize that I am far from the average user--most people aren't going to use their computer for communal video watching. So I'm sure the current Hulu design is fine for desktop viewing. However, with large flat screen monitors becoming common, more people without TiVos or other DVRs might start to use their computers like a TV. In this case, sites like Hulu will need to address navigation from afar--perhaps icons and text can get larger when moused over, or users can have a setting when they first login that can change layout for distance viewing.

For instance, when I finished watching Terminator, I wanted to browse other clips. Hulu shows several related clips below the main show, but it was hard to see what they were from where I was sitting. Making the experience better for distance viewers would let Hulu user have an experience similar to TiVo or AppleTV owners, without requiring them to pay extra for a special box.

Watch the 2008 Sugar Bowl, again

Hawaii's football team had a banner year, so in honor of my friends there, I'm posting the 2008 Sugar Bowl (Hawaii vs. Georgia), which recently became available on Hulu, courtesy of Fox Sports. Granted, it would be more fun for them to watch again if Hawaii had kept its undefeated season going and won on New Year's Day, but what you gonna do?

Hulu wants you to go away

I've watched old episodes of Heroes on the NBC own website but I assumed that with the debut of Hulu (the topic of my last three posts), that all NBC's content would move there. I was surprised to find out that both websites were being maintained and that both feature streaming shows with commercials. Frankly, the browsing experience on Hulu seems relatively clunky compared to NBC's own site.

So why did News Corp. and NBC bother to build Hulu? It's not for better ads or better browsing for users--based on what I've seen, they want you to embed their content. They don't necessarily want you to just go to Hulu-- they want you to take their content and spread it virally, just like what I've done below. Instead of making everyone come to their site, Fox and NBC let fans take their ad-laced shows and embed them into their own websites and blogs--so long as the commercials stay with the content and the impressions are reported back to Hulu, who cares where it lives? Fans were already posting clips or full episodes of Family Guy to YouTube and embedding it in their own sites--now they can do that legally and the networks can finally make money off of the viral spread of their videos. Hulu is acting like an ad broker, but unlike most ad brokers, Hulu doesn't have to pay users money to embed their ads because those users are getting valuable content for free.

They should probably try to make the user experience on their site better, but speaking as a recovering TV addict, if they were trying to make Hulu into a TV-like site where they wanted users to stay, they would have a related video start playing as soon as you had finished watching one, much like episodes flow into one another on TV. Instead, it pauses on a screen that allows you to email or embed the video. It seems they would prefer to get new eyeballs, not hit the same pair over and over.

It's too bad for Google that they were not able to negotiate any deals with the networks for YouTube. With their (perhaps scary) understanding of each user and their likes and dislikes based on previous searches and Gmail, they could probably do a much better job of targeting ads than Hulu, which can only go by the main demographic of the show. If Google were running Hulu, I, as a woman, might actually see an ad for Tampax or Yoplait during Family Guy, even though I was watching a show that seems to be targeted at men 18-30 years old.

It's no wonder the Writer's Guild of America is striking now. It's probably true that networks weren't able to make as much money off of webisodes and shows distributed online compared to TV broadcasts, but with Hulu and Joost (where you'll find CBS and Viacom programming) coming out last year, the potential is growing.

Sideways. Streaming. Free. Legal. One catch.

On a summer day in the mid-nineties, my graduating class clustered around a hole in the ground, tossing in items that were personal but of little value. The hole was a time capsule, to be sealed up at the end of the day and to be opened in a hundred years. While everyone else threw in their student ID, my mother saw the future. "Throw in your Blockbuster card. In a hundred years, people will wonder what that company was."

I got a new card the next day and, over a decade later, and as of just yesterday, I am still using it. We've had TiVo, and Netflix, but the promise of online, instant content has not quite been met. If you are uncomfortable using Bit Torrent to download pirated films, there is no way to get films online for free. iTunes and Amazon Unbox are options if you are willing to pay, but Amazon Unbox also requires a TiVo.

However, now there might be Hulu. While Hulu is dominated by TV content, a couple of studies seem to be experimenting with a handful of full-length feature movies. For instance, Twentieth Century Fox has contributed five movies. At one end of the spectrum, they have Weekend at Bernies, at the other, the Oscar-winning Sideways, which you can watch below for free.

The catch? Advertising of course. As with every example I've posted, you must watch commercials, in this case, a trailer for the movie Vantage Point. After that point, there are no commercials and you can fast forward to any point in the movie, but "swipes" will pop up from the bottom of the screen while you are watching.

Perhaps Hulu will move to a dual model, where you can get ad-free content if you pay a subscription. After all, it's one thing for a swipe to pop up during a comedy, quite another during Gandhi. But I think most people will tolerate intrusive ads for the chance to watch most movies straight through for free, especially if the ad is for another movie I might be interested in watching. Would you?

Corkscrewed: What where they thinking?

In response to a suggestion that my husband and I are both addicted to the internet, we are going to try to institute an internet-free Sunday. However, I could not resist blogging about one last thing before I log off.

In 2006, Nigel Lythgoe and Ken Warwick, the producers of American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance, starred in the reality series Corkscrewed: The Wrath of Grapes in which viewers are invited to watch their kooky adventures buying and running a vineyard, with guest appearances by Ryan Seacrest, Simon Cowell, and Paula Abdul.

If you're in the demographic of mature wine connoisseurs who also secretly love to watch reality talent shows, or 18-25 year olds with a private collection of wine in their cellar, then this is clearly the show for you! The rest of us are scratching their heads. This ran on the Fox Reality channel--did anyone watch this?

I do not understand how this show got greenlit --it is not exactly a fish-out-of-water story when a pair of millionaires "rough it" by buying a vineyard, as it was for Paris Hilton in The Simple Life. I understand the whole idea of The Long Tail, which is why this is now being offered for web syndication by Hulu, but how long would it take for Fox to recoup its money on this clunker? And did Ford and Axe Body Spray, which appear in advertisements peppered throughout this show, have any say into whether they wanted to sponsor a show about two oxford-wearing brits, instead of, say, an episode of Family Guy?

While I would love to review these shows for the sheer obscurity of it, I cannot bring myself to watch them, only the first minute of them. My favorite quote, therefore, is the intro to Episode Six, where Idol judge, friend and potential co-investor Simon Cowell says "OK, two years time, they've lost all their money, the whole thing's a disaster, do I help them? No. But what I would be prepared to do is to give them advice on future projects."

I am also prepared to give advice on future projects--Rupert, do not to invest in a show that features millionaires unless they are firing people or giving cows rectal exams. Vanity projects, even ones that are a bust, are not nearly as marketable as abject humiliation. Nonetheless, I will help Mr. Murdoch, because he must be really down on his luck after this lemon: if you truly love reality shows, here are the complete episodes of Corkscrewed via Hulu. But if you truly love wine, you'd be much better off checking out the blog of my friend Alder at http://www.vinography.com.

1) To Buy or Not To Buy: American Idol executive producers, Nigel Lythgoe and Ken Warwick, decide to buy a Vineyard (with a little help from some of their famous friends, including Simon Cowell, Randy J...


3) All Fired Up: With problems mounting, American Idol executive producers, Nigel Lythgoe and Ken Warwick, hold a crisis meeting to try to decide what to do about their troubled vineyard.


4) The Wine School: Ken and Nigel enroll in a crash course for running a winery. Meanwhile, gophers and squirrels are getting into the vineyard.


5) A Crushing Blow: Nigel and Ken head for Pasa Robles to try to turn their fortunes around. Later, back in Los Angeles, it's the day when the Emmy Awards are handed out. With their fourth nominati...


6) Sweet Dreams or Sour Grapes: Nigel Lythgoe and Ken Warwick finally meet the man who cancelled a major contract to buy their fruit. Later, they finally see the fruits of their labors as they witness their fi...


7) The Grape Escape: Nigel Lythgoe and Ken Warwick witness the enormous damage that wild boars have done to their vineyard. Later, visiting their winemaker, Nigel and Ken see there is hope that one ...

8) Parades, Parties and Pioneers: Nigel attends Priscilla Presley's party and is arrested. Ken has to handle the American Idol auditions in Memphis...alone.

A clip from Hulu: Jon Stewart on The Simpsons

I applied to Beta test Hulu, a joint project between News Corp (owner of Fox) and NBC to bring streaming content to the web. A more detailed review of the service later, but one of the things I wanted to experiment with was embedding content into this blog, which they are clearly advocating, because each clip contains ads or links that cannot be edited out. So, here goes. For your viewing pleasure, Jon Stewart's recent appearance on The Simpsons: