When it comes to debunking the New York Times' television critics, our attention is usually devoted to error-prone Alessandra Stanley. But in her review of Hulu.com (why?), it's Virginia Heffernan who doesn't know what she's talking about. CONTINUED »
MTV launched a new music video website today, MTVmusic, that looks suspiciously like Hulu's embeddable player.
Although hey, we're not complaining. It was about time MTV started associating themselves with music videos instead of crappy reality shows about rich kids with expensive and inappropriate birthdays and True Life: I have Acne specials.
But now that you've spent so long searching for your favorite music videos on YouTube, is MTVmusic too little, too late? Or does the Hulu ripoff offer the distinct advantage of easier interface that drew people to Hulu's site to begin with?
Plus, the whole "embeddable" issue that official videos on YouTube sometimes won't let you do, should be a huge draw with the MTV Livejournal (is that still a thing?) crowd.
Compare players below with Britney's "Womanizer" video:
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That whole Being John Malkovich field of comedy, where you get celebrities to play some grandiose, pompous version of themselves, was good for a laugh as far as Ricky Gervais' Extras, or maaaybe even Entourage (depends on who's making the cameos).
But in itself, the celebrity-as-self joke doesn't play unless the person in question is legitimately, and recognizably famous, or Neil Patrick Harris.
So it's a problem when Michael Eisner, once king of Disney, but now just another speculator in web videos and trading cards, has his boys combine his two favorite interests to make a vanity project based around his life:
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NBC has announced plans to stream premieres of several of its new season's lineup on the Internet, via the ad-happy HD video-player Hulu. Important in a "Long live the new flesh" Videodrome/new media kind of way, unimportant since the episodes will be the season openers of Chuck, Lipstick Jungle, and Life.
And, lest anyone mericfully forgets its existence, NBC's newest causality of Ben Silverman, the re-imagined Knight Rider, will also be debuting online.
So is this news? Technically. NBC already streams most of their shows (but not as a first-look sort of thing) on their website. But there are several shows that would have been a way better fit for a YA-friendly site like Hulu than these duds:
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Last year, it seemed like every piece of digital media ever would be available on the iTunes store. Now, not so much.
This season, Apple can no longer call itself the poor man’s TiVo. NBC ended its partnership with the iTunes store, opting to create its own video sharing site and sell through Amazon.
(NBC pulled down its YouTube station yesterday, implying that Hulu might launch soon.)
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It seemed like just yesterday that NBC announced its partnership with Amazon's Unbox. Of course, it wasn't so long ago that NBC started talking about its own video site, Hulu, and left the iTunes store. But now NBC has a new rock solid business plan for distributing its shows online: making their episodes free.
Users can now download shows for free from NBC Direct, but the episodes will have ads and automatically disappear from users' hard drives in a week. For now, this service is only available to PC users and the episodes are not transferable to iPods. NBC isn’t exactly giving up on its paid distribution service with Unbox, but as the Times knows, the only original content people are willing to pay for online is porn.
What the hell Hulu actually is remains a mystery. But by next week, NBC should have a new service that forgets about Hulu, disregards iPod users and cheats the Apple Store.
Fans of The Office, your $50 iTunes gift card is now useless.
NBC announced yesterday that it would be distributing its programming through Unbox, Amazon’s downloading video service, and has severed its ties with the iTunes store.
NBC decided to switch to Unbox—despite the fact that their videos are incompatible with video iPods—because the service will give them greater pricing flexibility. How this will affect Hulu was not mentioned, but it’s becoming increasingly possible that the whole concept is just a digital media red herring.
Apple’s control over pricing and packages was the main cause for the switch. Jean-Briac Perrette, president of NBC Universal Digital Distribution said, "Amazon is a company that understands the value we provide as content owners to its business."
If NBC had stayed on with Apple, the iTunes would have charged $1.99 for an episode of the Bionic Woman, which if anything, overestimates NBC’s content value.
…Which totally has everything to do with escalating tensions (between NBC and Apple) caused by "piracy concerns" and nothing whatsoever to do with NBC/News Corp.'s brand-new super secret video site, Hulu.
Have you heard of Hulu? It's the new video site brought to you by the collaborative efforts of NBC (best known for bringing you TV's The Apprentice) and News Corp. (best known for its miserly leader, Rupert Murdoch and his evil Republican empire).
As of now it's somewhat unclear what the site does, and Business Week is already demanding answers. "Other than the name," a frustrated Catherine Holahan writes, "the company would reveal little else about the much-hyped project." Which left poor Cathy wanting answers.
'Will the site allow viewers to download either single episodes, entire seasons or only clips of NBC/Fox's most popular shows like Friday Night Lights 24?' she wonders.
