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iTunes Alternative, Hulu, Goes from Beta to Live

The joint venture between News Corp. and NBC Universal, Hulu, is set to go officially live on Wednesday, according to Variety. Content from other partners, Warners Brothers and Liongate will also be included.

Huliu is set to launch with about 250 TV shows in addition to 100 feature films. All are add supported. According to Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, this quadruples the previous content in the beta stage.

Other partners are also being sought, including Disney/ABC and CBS, but no deals have been signed.

Programming will include Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, The Office, The Simpsons and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and SciFi, including some older hits like Airwolf.

"People will be very surprised at the content being made available on a free, ad-supported basis," Mr. Kilar said. Hulu claims they have gone from zero to 5 million views since the Beta started in October. However, the number of unique viewers was not disclosed.

The challenge now is to convince viewers that they'll want to watch free TV shows and movies from the Hulu library on the Internet, on a smaller screen, with commercials when they could be using a DVR on their regular TV to skip those commercials. Apple's iTunes library offers TV shows for sale, generally for $1.99 each, but without commercials. In addition, they can be moved to their video iPod. Time will tell whether there's a market for both viewing models on the Internet.

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TosaDeac said:

member since 05 Feb 2008 with 16 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

As long as it is not as buggy as some of the network websites I might check it out every once in a while during downtime or over lunch at the office. I have watched a few episodes on NBC and ABC websites but I had problems with the site hanging up or crashing out completely. Also had a hard time skipping to different parts of the episode. It is easy enough to just open a different browser window and surf while the ads are playing so they are not too obstructive. Also will be interesting to see the quality and size of the video compared to the iTunes downloads. Overall I don't think it will replace iTunes due to the lack of transportability to iPods/iPhones, AppleTv, or any other portable video player not from Apple for viewing on the go.

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