The unexpected success of Hulu.com (the joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp) has caused broad rethinking within the media about how to distribute TV and other video online. They wonder: Do we partner with Hulu or build our own?

Hulu has become a top-10 video site. In August, by ComScore's measure, it served more than 122 million Tv shows. Hulu has been able to build a brand from nothing and create a significant consumer business just by putting TV on the web. (However, Hulu still gets a fraction of YouTube's 5 billion monthly videos.)

HBO, which is not ad-supported is developing a video portal at hbo.com and says that will push the limit of what it can do without cannibalizing cable subscription. Its plan includes offering clips and some full episodes.

Corporate sibling Warner Bros. is attempting to revive the WB TV network and plans its own Hulu-like site site.

Joost, the last start-up to launch with Hulu-like buzz in 2006, has spent much of the past year retooling, creating a web-based interface to make itself a bit more like Hulu.


Viral TV clips will drive larger audiences than conventional TV

The number of people who have watched Saturday Night Live (SNL)’s Sarah Palin’s clips on the web (at NBC.com, Hulu and YouTube) surpassed the 15 million that watched on TV. This is important: viral TV clips will soon drive larger audiences on the web.


Innovation journalism is more relevant than investigative journalism

Read these observations on media from experts attending the Bioneers 2008 conference:

“TV is a powerful media whose agenda was once created by newspapers. Newspapers, though, are on their way out. You can set the agenda for television by using new media –blog, YouTube, Facebook and other popular sites –and being the source of stories that television stations will want to pick up.”

“Niche TV is a new wave. Focusing a program or station on specific issues rather than broad strokes is on its way in. But it needs money. We have to demand money be sent to visionary media makers, rather than junk TV.”

“Innovation journalism is becoming more relevant than investigative journalism –finding out how everything works together and taking a look at it in new ways. Media is changing from one-way messaging service to an interactive format for information exchange.”


TV journalists forced to learn new skills

More and more voices talk about the urgency to re-engineer local TV news. Right now in a new fractured digital world, stories are too expensive to produce with the old model. Newsroom must produce and aggregate multiple forms of content –even non-news content- on multiple platforms with a streamlined cost structure.

Employees must learn new skills and become more adept at juggling multiple specialties. Writers, for example, should know how to write TV stories, web stories and blog posts. They should also know how to edit videos and photos.


Fox launches new publishing platform

Lin TV is pulling its 29 stations off World Now and switching to Fox Interactive Media’s publishing system called the Digital Publishing Platform and described “as a true plug-and-play solution”, that provides “a la carte menu of features, from which you include what you see fit.”

Fox Interactive Media says that “this helps keep cost down –you pay for what you want- and it also ensures that each Web site is unique.”

The platform allows to custom develop desired items, and includes, video, blogs, social networking, geocoding and the ability to plug in external RSS feeds. WPRI is the first non-Fox Lin to switch to the new platform and design, and WISHtv.com is the second.

It’s clear that Fox Interactive Media has moved into the platform business to take on the likes of WorldNow, IB, Clickability, Zope4Media, DTI, Inergize and BIM.

What is sure that TV stations want a lot more options than anyone has been offering. They don’t want all their sites to look exactly the same, and they want the ability to customize what they offer their visitors. Something that you can adjust on the fly, and can add or subtract widgets and indexes without a major site redesign.

Msnbc.com has launched a new video technology that allows users to navigate an extended piece of video by keyword. They have started to use it in presidential debates, and they call it “debate video player”. See it in action right here. There are plans to make the entire player embeddable.

“This innovative and interactive video player, available at politics.msnbc.com , allows consumers to watch the full debate, and, at any time skip ahead to a specific topic by selecting one of the 20 key words available. When consumers click on a key word, the timeline reveals the various points during the debate when those phrases were spoken by the candidates. Users can then explore the issues in context of the larger debate and also read analysis provided by NBC News,” says Msnbc.


YouTube to offer TV shows facing competition from Hulu

YouTube will offer full-length episodes of some television shows, catching up to other Web sites that have promoted them, like Hulu.com (100 million video streams a month). Those videos will include advertising before, during and after each episode, following standards on network television sites. (See an example of what comes on the CBS page on YouTube, where offered TV shows like MacGyver, Dexter and Californication).

The growth of YouTube –five billion videos viewed in July, 44 percent of all online video consumption in the U.S.- has come primarily from short videos that last only a few minutes. And their founders had resisted so-called preroll, midroll and postroll advertising for fears that it would alienate users.

For short videos, YouTube is committed so far to in-video overlays (banner advertisements that sometimes appear on the bottom of videos).


YouTube introduces a new type of e-commerce ad

YouTube users can now click to buy digital goods without leaving the site from iTunes or Amazon Unbox, thanks to a new ad format aimed to turn the site's large audience into substantial revenue.

Google says the new ads are YouTube's first step toward building a viable e-commerce platform. For now, the program is limited to buying songs from EMI or the Universal Music Group on iTunes and Amazon. Over time, YouTube plans to expand the program to include other stores and other merchandise, like concert tickets.


AP quits Microsoft video technology

The AP’s Online Video Network, which powers online video on 2,100 affiliate sites in the US, many of them newspapers, has switched technology providers from Microsoft to ThePlatform, an industry leader in the broadband video management and publishing market, which is a subsidiary of Comcast.

In addition to offering enhanced content, AP will offer network affiliates for the first time a fully embeddable video player for video destination pages. The new system will also support higher video quality.

"The new version of the network will make it easier for our affiliates to incorporate compelling news video on their Web sites," said AP. "As video becomes the storytelling medium of choice on the Internet, we’re improving the content as well as the technical environment."

AP, as the world’s largest newsgathering organization, draws on its worldwide staff of journalists to create authoritative video clips of international and national events, entertainment, sports, and business news.

(The AP Online Video Network is an ad-supported news video service that draws on the global newsgathering resources of The Associated Press and its network of members and customers in the United States to provide video summaries of breaking news stories for Web sites).