Hulu is a legal streaming website owned by Fox Entertainment Group and NBC Universal, featuring popular shows and clips from various networks. It offers current episodes of ongoing shows and full seasons of older ones, with periodic advertising breaks. Hulu limits competition with traditional broadcasting and occasionally offers longer ads or non-profit commercials.
Hulu is a website launched in early 2008 that was created to stream video to users. Unlike many previous streaming video sites, which made illegal use of commercial television and video properties, Hulu does everything completely legally, licensing content appropriately from copyright holders. It is financed through advertising, which is performed both in the sidebars of the site and in short clips both at the beginning of the video and at regular intervals during viewing.
The two owners of the site are Fox Entertainment Group and NBC Universal, two of the largest television networks. This partnership allows Hulu to distribute a large amount of popular programs, which has helped it quickly gain critical mass and entice other providers to join as well. Hulu currently features shows and clips from USA, FX, SPEED, E!, Oxygen, Bravo, PBS, G4, and Comedy Central, among others. Most of the popular shows on Hulu, however, come from Fox or NBC.
A number of older shows have also begun to see release on Hulu, including older sitcoms from the 1960s and 1970s. The licensing agreements allowed Hulu to obtain full seasons of these programs for high-quality distribution, making the site instantly popular with older fans or fans of retro television. At the same time, Hulu keeps enough current programming running to make it the obvious destination for even contemporary viewers.
Hulu’s model for ongoing shows tends to be that they will show the current five episodes of that show, so as not to interfere too heavily with DVD sales or reruns. This is ideal for people who don’t have a television and want to keep up with the shows, or for those who have missed the most recent episode or two of their favorite show. While there’s plenty of room to delve into the archives of the shows Hulu carries, the fact that it’s owned and operated by two major networks limits the amount of competition it’s willing to give traditional broadcasting, which in turn helps it attract and hold back other networks.
For advertising, Hulu is primarily a modified business model. At periodic intervals throughout the show, usually three or four times, a short fifteen-second commercial plays. This commercial is generally for the same product or service, and sometimes it may simply be the same ad repeated over and over again. Hulu also airs many commercials for non-profit organizations. Occasionally, Hulu will offer you an alternative to this business model, where you can choose to watch a slightly longer mini-ad video, typically between one and two minutes, or go the traditional business route.
For some shows, usually those that have been pulled from the air, Hulu will offer the entire archive of the show. “Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip” is a good example of this, with the entire run of the show available online. Other shows may have all past seasons available, but not the entire current season. Still others may have the entire season going, but none of the past seasons.
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