Hulu for Australia. Here's Hoping...

Cameron Craig

Last updated 07 December 2010

The Australian Television market looks like it may be in line for one of the great innovations in internet TV, Hulu. Of course, there are other great internet TV innovations, like NetFlix (US only), Fetch TV, BitTorrent, YouTube and others, but in this post we're going to focus on Hulu as it is unfamiliar to many Australian users, and it is brilliant.

An article in The Australia recently revealed that PBL (now the Nine Entertainment Co) is close to signing a 'heads of agreement' for Hulu in Australia. Now, we know that a Heads of Agreement is not going to give us access to Hulu before Christmas (which is when we need it most as Australian summer TV programming is rubbish), but it may be coming soon...

PBL is believed to be in the midst of signing a heads of agreement to form a joint venture with US video streaming website Hulu. PBL also owns 50 per cent of NineMSN, a joint venture with Microsoft, as well as a 49 per cent shareholding in Carsales.com, an interest in online health insurance guide iSelect and group buying website Cudo.

via Daniel Petre joins PBL Media's board | The Australian.

An Overdue Introduction to Hulu

Hulu is a US web service which is currently only available to internet users in the US, where you can stream episodes of TV shows over the internet via flash in your web browser. It is all legal and above board - in fact it is encouraged by the TV networks.

The site is a joint venture between NBC Universal, Fox, and ABC in the US (and other smaller networks but excluding CBS, meaning you won't see Two and Half a Men on Hulu, making the service even better in our minds).

This allows Hulu to offer shows like The Office, 30 Rock, Community, Grey's Anatomy, Glee, Fringe, Bones and the all time greatest show ever produced, Arrested Development.

Each network contributes their TV content and some of their movie content to a central online location, Hulu, for streaming over the internet to your computer, phone, iPad or internet enabled TV. It is supported by advertising, although there are only a couple of advertisements per episode.

It's a big deal in the US and it will have just as big an impact when it launches here so it is time for a thorough introduction.

Hulu was formed as the big internet distribution response by TV networks in the US when they finally admitted that the internet was a threat to prime time TV audiences. Realising that they were losing ground to pirates and video sharing sites like youtube.com, they teamed up to create a central destination to stream full quality versions of their shows with advertising embedded in the online stream, a revenue model that they were already familiar with from prime time TV.

The service was started in 2007 and was already in operation by the middle of 2008 and has grown ever since. It is supported by advertising and these ads are very un-offensive when compared to the advertisements on prime time on terrestial TV.

Technically, Hulu is one of the largest projects built on Ruby on Rails, with an impressive interface and performance. The site enjoyed a very quick turn around from concept to build, with Hulu's success now putting it amongst one of the top 5 sites in the world built on Rails, along with Twitter, Scribd and YellowPages.com in the US.

Hulu is a joint venture by the networks, but is a separate company from the network's operating companies which has helped the speed of launch and Hulu's nimble development behaviour. If they'd been asked to build Hulu to by co-operating daily as networks to merge the technology backbones of the networks, we'd have no Hulu.

The Name, Hulu

Hulu was the butt of many internet jokes pre-launch, as the translations of the name' Hulu' in other languages gradually came to light. Ok, that was cheap. Here's why:

Hulu means “butt” in both Indonesian and Malay. In Swahili, Hulu means, among other things, both “cease” and “desist.” The irony of course being that pirates and video streaming sites like youtube were repeatedly sent 'cease and desist' notices or 'take down' notices by these same networks when they thought a site had illegally taken their content and were streaming it to their users.

The official translation that Hulu cite is of "hulu" in Mandarin:

A gourd. In ancient times, the gourd was used in China as a "holder of precious things". That appealed to us given the premium content-focused mission of Hulu

Hulu is Big

Hulu's monthly video streams reached 903 million in January 2010 in the US and over three times the figure for a year earlier. They are second only to YouTube according to ComScore.

When Hulu hits our shores, you'll be talking about it and turning to the web for some of your TV without any doubt.

More TV Series and Episodes

The original model behind Hulu was to offer only the most recent 5 episodes of the TV show to air and some selected TV series (usually retired TV series).

If you wanted to start watching a new series from scratch, there was nothing you could do as you could only get the 5 most recent episodes. Recently however, this has changed for the better.

Hulu Plus is a new monthly subscription service launched on June 29, 2010 for $7.99 per month. Like the free version of Hulu the video streams do contain ads, but they're nothing like the annoying in ads in prime time. The key difference is that with Hulu Plus you get access to full seasons of TV shows and back catalogues.

Hulu Plus is available on more than just your computer, including any Blu-ray-linked television made by Samsung, Sony, Vizio, Panasonic, or LG, as well as all iOS 4 devices made by Apple (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch), the gaming consoles PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, as well as the Roku Streaming Player, TiVo Premiere, and WD TV Media Player.

Quality of Hulu Video Streams

We're always impressed by the quality of Hulu videos. They are streamed as Flash video files (FLV files) using the H.264 codec that is supported on Flash Player 10 and above (which is installed on more than 97% of computers in the U.S.). The Hulu player chooses the optimal stream for each user based on the available bandwidth on their broadband connection. Hulu currently supports four different streams including 480kbps, 700kbps, 1,000kbps (an H.264 encode that is not on On2 VP6) and 2.5Mbps.

How Serious is Hulu?

Hulu is a serious effort to distribute content and we're talking about a service that is a real business and is looking at an IPO in the US, not a pirate website that might be shut down tomorrow. As testament to this, check out the board of directors: