Hulu.com is one of the websites offering hit TV shows, movies and clips hosted by Hulu, produced by over 190 content companies, including FOX, NBC Universal, ABC, Comedy Central, MGM, MTV Networks, National Geographic, Paramount, Sony Pictures Television and Warner Bros. Hulu.com hosts over 1,700 popular primetime TV series, including The Simpsons, 30 Rock, LOST, The Daily Show and The Office, which are available for streaming viewing across the United States, the day after being publicly broadcast.

Hulu.com was launched in beta on October 29, 2007 with AOL, MSN, Facebook, and Yahoo! as its stakeholders. Hulu became available to the public on March 12, 2008. On April 30, 2009, Disney joined in, purchasing a 27% stake in Hulu.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/30/AR2009043001853.html

While the site is free of charge, the business model of Hulu.com depends on commercials, formatted similarly to regular TV shows: full screen commercials are inserted at the same spots as with regular Television broadcast. Several News Corp. executives, including Deputy Chairman Chase Carey have announced they wanted to start charging for Hulu content sometime in 2010.http://www.broadcastingcable.com/blog/ADverse_Atkinson_on_Advertising/23941-Chase_Carey_Hulu_to_Charge_in_2010.php?nid=2228&source=title&rid=6454445

As of November 2009, Hulu also includes Music Videos, including Music Videos released by labels EMI and Warner Music Group these videos are located in the Hulu Music channel.

Next to the regular web browser version of Hulu, an experimental program called "Hulu Desktop" is available though Hulu Labs, which enables users to access content from Hulu without need of a browser.

According to Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, 2009 revenue was more than $100 million, and the site had been profitable for Q4 2009, and Q1 2010.http://mashable.com/2010/03/31/hulu-ipad-subscription/

Hulu.com allows limited two-way communication, with the main purpose the distribution of video streams. Users can select and compose their preferred video streams, review and rate episodes and discuss topics related to their favorite TV series. However, in contrast to video streaming site YouTube.com, user interactions is still less common on Hulu.com.

Comparing Hulu to YouTube

While both Hulu and YouTube focus on streaming video to their users, they both have a very different approach. YouTube focuses on user-created and 'indie' footage, with high interactivity between its users. Each user automatically gets assigned his own home page, or 'channel', which concentrates all activity by that user, including his own content, his shared favorites, all comments and ratings received and provided, and 'friends' made on the site. Because of the structure of YouTube, finding the best videos (and being found) largely depends on buzz, attention by other media, or even coincidence. Seemingly unexciting videos can become extremely popular, while really interesting or funny videos might never be discovered.

In contrast, Hulu takes a more conservative approach, re-using the one-to-many broadcasting of professionally created copyrighted material, a method well established by TV broadcasting companies. Hulu mostly presents footage previously broadcasted on TV. While Hulu allows users to comment, rate, review and discuss episodes, the experience is far less interactive than when visiting YouTube. TV Shows and movies are clearly categorized in Channels, and can easily be found and subscribed to.

With this in mind, YouTube is more similar to social media, while Hulu is more in line with traditional television broadcasting.

• May 8, 2010: Saturday Night Live hosted by Betty White was released on Hulu.com, and became an instant hit. The full episode was accompanied by some scenes not aired on TV. The episode can be viewed here on hulu.
  
• April 30, 2010: Dr Strangelove, the classic by Stanley Kubrick is available on Hulu.com. The movie can be found here on Hulu.
• April 18, 2010: House of Five Leaves is available on Hulu.com. "House of the Five Leaves" is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Natsume Ono. It can be found here on Hulu.
• April 16, 2010: Hulu.com hosts 18 titles of Zatoichi, a Japanese fictional character, blind masseur and swordmaster. The episodes are hosted here.

On June 4, 2010, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar held a presentation at Tsinghua University in Beijing. At that presentation, Kilar announced Hulu is planning to launch its services in China. Next to that, he also mentioned Hulu might allow users to upload their own videos, making Hulu more interactive than it current 'Internet broadcast' based model. Hulu.com has an R&D center in Beijing.

Early in June 2010, several websites, including 1UP, Gear Live and Gamespot reported Hulu.com might become available on the xBox 360, through its xBox Live. According to these rumors, Microsoft would announce this new service on E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Microsoft has its E3 press conference planned for June 14, at 10 a.m. PST. The addition of Hulo.com to Live would compliment the Xbox Experience dashboard, which already contains features like Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm.

According to sources, the Hulu Channel on xBox would be a for-pay offering, which might be linked to Hulu's plans to introduce Hulu Plus, a subscription version of the current popular free offering. Hulu Plus would offer it subscribers a wider catalog of shows, and wouldn't be limited to the last five aired shows, like with the current free offer.http://www.gamespot.com/news/6264444.html

On May 14, 2010, Hulu.com announced it would continue to support Adobe Flash instead of switching to HTLM5. As Flash is not supported by Apple, the iPad will not be able to access and play Hulu content directly through the webbrowser.

Several other addtions were announced also:

• Adaptive Bitrate Streaming
• Ad Volume Normalization
• Closed Captioning Display
• Seek Preview
• Heat Map
• Bigger Player
• Introducing Ad Tailor
• More Customization
• Personalized Recommendationshttp://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/hulu-planning-major-upgrades/

Hulu TV series and movies are categorized in Channels, resembling regular movie categories, like "Drama", Action and Adventure", "Comedy", "Sports", "Horror and Suspense" and more. Some larger Channels like the popular 'Comedy" channel have been subdivided into more detailed channels, including "Satire", "Sketch" and 'Stand Up".

Users can browse the available content based on these channels, but can also select "Most Popular", "Recently Added", or access "Collections", "Trailers" or "Spotlight" options. They can subscribe to their favorite TV shows and movies, making them easier to track. Users can queue up and manage shows and episodes, planning ahead their viewing period, without having to wade through their selection after each episode, creating their own personal viewing evening.

Recently, Hulu.com has added a Captions functionality, which is still in Beta. Hulu also allows embedding of its TV shows on other pages (like on Mahalo, see below), even though the regional restrictions remain intact.

With the introduction of Android firmware version 2.2, Android cellphones support Adobe Flash 10.1 beta. With this version of Adobe flash, Hulu.com has now accessible on select Android running cellphones.

The Nexus One runs Hulu after a simple setting:
By using the “about:debug” command in the default web browser and setting the UAString to “desktop”, users can make Hulu think it is running on a desktop or laptop, making it stream video to the device.

A step-by-step description is given on Absolutely Android

Hulu requires Adobe Flash Player 10.0.22 or higher. Because of this, Apple iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch users are restricted from using Hulu services. According to reports, Hulu might release a dedicated iPad App, but this App might also be combined with a paid subscription model.

According to Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, “Our mission is to help people discover the world’s premium content, and we believe that subscriptions can help to unlock some of that, including sports and movies and premium cable shows. We’re certainly open to subscriptions as a complement to an ad-supported model.” http://mashable.com/2010/03/31/hulu-ipad-subscription/