I don’t “twitter” yet (twitter-tech is still a bit too girly for me, all that constant checking in on each other and stuff) and Angela’s Twittering Teddy (see below) is certainly not my digital tea cup.
But I do confess to dancing a mean digital Hulu. Now that’s a good deal different from the Hawaiian hula. Hulu is the high resolution website posted by NBC and we’ve posted on it before.
I was an occasional congregant at the Hulu site to catch up on all the small bits posted there from past Saturday Night Live skits that I’d missed on NBC. But in May the Church of Hulu got a whole lot livelier – you can now watch an entire episode of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report instead of just a few brief gag segments. Sheer bliss, and no TIVO required.
Other shows like 24 and The Office have been on Hulu for some time – as well as a hip collection of movies like The Big Lebowski, Sideways, and The Usual Suspects.
Granted it’s still the day old bread of life they’re serving to communicants – Comedy Central, owned by Viacom, doesn’t have the guts yet to let another medium compete head on with its own ad-packed cable broadcast and I’m not sure why they permit Hulu to compete at all with Viacom’s own Daily Show web stream. But sometime overnight the latest edition pops up on delicious Hulu.
Hulu remains some strange complex consortium of Jeff Zucker’s NBC Universal, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., and other broadcast and cablecast players. The fact that Sumner Redstone of Viacom is suddenly so generous to this new “premium content” channel suggests that money and partnership may soon follow.
This much is clear: Hulu’s still hot and perhaps near a proverbial tipping point – 63 million “streams” in April alone. (I’m responsible for about 30 of those taps.) The L.A. Times points out that YouTube had 4 billion streams in April, but, hey, Baby Hulu’s got to walk before it can run. And with Jeff, Rupert and Sumner all playing godfather and playing nice, how can it fail?
Dream of stream and check it out again if your last visit to Hulu land was awhile ago … you can always twitter Angela when you get there and let her know how you “feel” about the experience.
■ Tom Goff
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