EW

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Entertainment Weekly has an article on Hulu in today's issue. Online at EW.com, Ken Tucker created a list of 10 videos, personal picks, discovered as he surfed Hulu over a work week. It's a good list that I'll have to work my way through sometime (yes, as with being a film student and having no time to watch movies, working at Hulu leaves you with little time to watch much TV, except in your spare time, on Hulu).


Always exciting to be in a magazine that is such a pop culture touchstone, but especially exciting for Christina, our fearless PR leader.


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Buffy the Vampire Slayer

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Happy day! Hulu added all of Season 2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, maybe my favorite of all the seasons of the show. If you've never watched the show, you can catch up on the short 12 episode season 1 on Hulu and flow right into the full 22 episode second season.


The show's sophomore season is a television classic built on so many of the series' best romances: Buffy and Angel's tragic love affair, the beauty and the geek pairing of Cordelia and Xander, the odd couple of Willow and Oz, and even one between Watcher Giles and Jenny Calendar. As so many shows are working hard to crank out new episodes in the wake of the strike settlement, I can't think of too many better ways to fill your TV void.






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Hulu launches

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Around 1:45AM this morning, Hulu shed the covers of private beta and opened to the public. Anyone in the U.S. can now come to our site and watch any of our videos for free. No special software needed other than a web browser, Flash player, and an internet connection. PC, Mac, Linux users, we support all of you.


We've all substituted caffeinated beverages for sleep for days now, and this morning I came into work with my t-shirt on backwards. Coherence is going to be a bit of a reach.


We have increased our content lineup significantly. Among my favorites:



People love to associate Hulu with big media because of some of our investors, but Hulu is a startup through and through (look at the team photo below, taken at around 1:50 this morning--I don't think we look big media, do you?). It's the smallest company I've ever worked at if you don't count the lemonade stand I ran one summer day when I was about 8. Smaller than Amazon.com was when I worked there. We have our initial investments from which to run our company, but we're not going to be spending it on big parties with models walking around holding trays of saffron baby lamb chops. No, our pre-launch evening meal for everyone pulling an all-nighter was some 100 tacos from a local taco truck here in Santa Monica, at the extravagant cost of $1.25 per taco. Our biggest spend that night, out of our own pockets, was to raise $160 among the team to dare one of our star programmers Andrew to drink two cups of salsa, one red hot, one green, in 30 seconds. Andrew woke this morning $160 richer, though I'd venture to guess he paid the price sometime during the day.




A small group of people, a little family, work night and day (sometimes more night than day) to put this site together from scratch. Some of the user e-mails I've read make the easy assumption that we're an ignorant, uncaring media behemoth, but we do care, perhaps too much for our own peace of mind. Between Eric, Betina, and myself, we've read well over 10,000 e-mails since we went into our private beta, and rather than go the form e-mail response route, we've tried to respond personally to every e-mail we can. We're gratified by the compliments, and we agonize over the angry e-mails, even the inaccurate and/or profane ones.


We do want to be able to distribute our content internationally. We do want to offer more episodes of every show on our site. We do want more varied ad creative so that we don't have to watch the same ad spots over and over. We do want closed-captioning on every video on our site. And we do want to do it legally, in a way that compensates the creative people all the way back at the start of the food chain. Not a day goes by that we don't wish we could just accelerate the future with a snap of our fingers and have everyone in the world streaming HD content to their plasma TV's.


It's easy to bash big media and claim to be forced to resort to piracy, and it is absolutely the right of users to write in with their honest feedback. It's the most useful kind. But it's far harder to try to fix the problems. It's easy to open up your blog editor and rip the movie you just saw. It's exponentially harder to go out and make a movie. It's easy to laugh at some startup you read about in the news because the business plan sounds terrible. It's much harder to start a company yourself.


We're working here to try to fix the industry from within. We want to be able to watch all our favorite videos however we want, just like you. We're building this service to be one we want to use. We're not anywhere near the finish line. It always feels like the to-do list outweighs the completed side of the ledger. But if it didn't, then it wouldn't be that interesting a challenge, and most of us probably wouldn't be here.


Check out our site, and if you don't mind, help spread the word. The more users we can rally to our cause, the quicker we can transform things for the better.


Cheers!



























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Hey, it's Julie Taylor

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I'm not sure why I didn't notice this before, but the person asking the question in the (in)famous Miss South Carolina clip from the Miss Teen USA competition is Aimee Teegarden.






Friday Night Lights was a really good book, a good movie, and it's a great TV series, too, though admittedly I've only been able to watch 7 episodes here on Hulu, 15 minutes here and there over lunch at the desk.


With shows like Arrested Development and Friday Night Lights, what's the truth? Do devoted fans overestimate the mass appeal of the show, or is it really, as fans claim, misguided marketing strategies on the part of the studio. If Friday Night Lights aired on a better night, not Friday night, would it grab a wider audience? How could Arrested Development have been saved?


The economics of more niche TV series and movies still seem prohibitive for creators. Talking to many producers of indie films, even finding a niche audience on DVD doesn't help many of them to recoup production costs.


Lower production costs, remove some layers of middleman marketing and replace with more efficient marketing channels (read: the Internet), lower distribution costs (again, the Internet), bump some of the revenue streams forward in time (overlap windows like DVD and theatrical/first run TV broadcast), and I hope the ecosystem is more friendly to shows like this.


As for Friday Night Lights, if you don't already watch it, the best way for me to support it is to try and hook you. Here are the first three episodes from season one.














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State of the arts

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Bryan Caplan on Tyler Cowen on the state of the arts:



From the standpoint of the consumer, the supply of great art has clearly never been better. And even from the standpoint of the producer, it is easy to argue that, overall, this is the best of times.

From Caplan's five points on why that is:



5. One of Tyler's best points: The past often looks better than the present if you compare the best to the best. There is no living composer as great as Bach. Nevertheless, the present looks much better than the past if you compare the fifth-best to the fifth-best. Who even wants to listen to the fifth-best Baroque composer? But the fifth-best punk rock band (say, the Dead Kennedys) is excellent.

That's almost certainly true for television. In music, thought CD sales are down, distribution via the Internet means I can more easily discover new music than in the days when radio was my primary means of exposure.


I'm less certain about the quality of movies overall, but there's no doubt that accessing classic movies via DVD and services like Netflix has broadened my viewing canvas in a huge way.


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Super Bowl ads

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Wow, what an upset! Tom Brady can take solace in being one of the few people in the world for whom this ad is not aspirational.


We've posted all the ads from the Super Bowl at Hulu. If you have an invite, you can see them here. If you don't have a Hulu invite, you can see them here.
I also have some Hulu invites to give out, so leave a comment with your e-mail address if you're interested in one but haven't gotten in yet.

Liftoff

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Tonight's episode of Mythbusters settled, among other things, that long-standing Internet debate about whether or not an airplane on a conveyor belt moving backwards (like a treadmill) at a speed equal to the airplane's normal ground speed during takeoff would lift off or not.


The answer? The plane does take off. The thurst of the airplane engines acts on air, not on the ground through the wheels.


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Conan O'Brien playing Rock Band

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Since I got my repaired guitar for Rock Band (looks like there was a design flaw that they've since corrected in other shipments, thankfully), it's the only game I spend any time playing. When I hear a song that's in Rock Band come on the radio, my ears try to pick out the guitar or drum line, and I visualize the notes in the guitar line scrolling down towards me as in the videogame. It really does engage you with music in a very deep way. It's the same bond I feel with classical pieces I played when I was in the violin section of various youth orchestras.


I'm not the only one who feels that way. In just two months since Rock Band launched, players have purchased more than 2.5 million new songs to add to their game libraries! I'm responsible for at least a good 10 to 12 of those song purchases. $1.99 for a song I can play forever in the game seems entirely reasonable to me. I would love to see them allow third parties to offer songs for the game, though, as the trickle of 3 new songs a week already feels paltry (though they added some Oasis songs this week--can't wait to try my hand at those!).


This past weekend, the morning after one particular late-night Rock Band session, I found a notice hanging on my front door for a Community Violation. The box for "loud music" was checked off. At first I was perturbed, but then a certain sense of pride took hold as I realized I was still young enough to keep the neighbors up.


My one and primary complaint is that stand-alone guitars are still not available for the game, so you can't play with a full four piece band. Unless you invite over a Rock Band-playing friend who plays it on the same console as you do and is willing to bring over their guitar, you're limited to playing either guitar or bass but not both. That guitars from one game, like Guitar Hero, don't work with other games, like Rock Band, is extremely disappointing as they all use the same basic control scheme.


My only guess on this is that they rushed the game out for the holidays and couldn't ramp up production in time to have stand-alone guitars available. Forecasting in the gaming industry seems dodgy, at best. You'd think after so many years that the Nintendo Wii would be readily available, but no.


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Firefly

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At the end of last week, we added every episode of Firefly to Hulu. Watching all fourteen episodes and then topping it off with the feature film Serenity would be a satisfying way to spend part of your holiday break. The movie can be watched without having seen the TV show, but it packs a much greater emotional punch if you watch the TV run first. Here are the first two episodes:


We also added all of the first season of Roswell. Before Katherine Heigl was Aizy on Critical Assembly and Izzie the human on Grey's Anatomy, she was Isabel, the alien-human hybrid on Roswell. I'm awaiting her next show, when she is simply Iz, a metaphoric concept of woman. Here's the Roswell pilot: