Hulu Launches With Few YouTube Killing Qualities

Hulu.com, the online video venture from NBC Universal and News Corp., has launched a private beta program. Early reports suggest it's far from being a YouTube killer. "Although Hulu's parent companies have done a lot of things right with the service, the scheduling leaves something to be desired. For the time being, the site will only feature five weeks worth of content for any given show. From there, it's assumed that older content will get the boot in favor of newer episodes and movies. This isn't necessarily a deal breaker for us, but for a lot of viewers this will prevent the service from becoming with online video Shangri-La they'd imagined. Furthermore, with the lack of user-generated content, it falls short of the end-all be-all site for online video. Viewers are still going to go to YouTube and still click their ads -- but in terms of piracy a minor rebellion may have been quelled."

Comments

A better Youtube killer

[ardor]

is this: http://stage6.divx.com/

Beta isn't very private

[smart2000]

On the corporate blog there is a sample video. The URL to watch any video is of the form:
http://www.hulu.com/embed/1734 In a stunning lack of foresight the number is the primary key of the record in the database. You can enter anything less than 1850 and view the shows. Since they give permission to embed on your own web pages, I've embedded a sample of ten random shows