In claiming the Hulu is safe from potential fees, Burke is speaking of behalf of the Comcast's recently absorbed NBC Universal, which has a 27% stake in the Hulu venture—the same as News Corp and ABC. In other words, while Comcast execs are now privy to whatever discussions are going inside Hulu, they can't really guarantee anything without cooperation from the site's other partners. Including the one that's loudly demanding that Hulu develop some kind of pay service, soon.

In other words, Burke's answer assures one thing: that nobody, especially Hulu, knows exactly how the site will change over the next year. [Silicon Alley Insider]

• Media: GPU hardware acceleration, new codec support (H.264, AAC, MPEG-4), raw bitstream Audio/Video API, and improved logging for media analytics
• Graphics: GPU Acceleration and hardware compositing, perspective 3D, bitmap and pixel API, pixel shader effects, and Deep Zoom improvements
• Application development: Deep linking, navigation and SEO, improved text quality, multi-touch support, 60+ controls available, and library caching support
• Data: Data-binding improvements, validation error templates, server data push improvements, binary XML networking support, and multi-tier REST data support

That first one is far and away the most important, since high-bitrate HD streaming is well on its way to becoming the de facto standard for online video, and Flash kinda sucks at it. I still notice fairly high CPU utilization running their test video, but the instant skipping feature is definitely impressive. [Ars]

Peter Kafka hears that all of ABC's big shows, like Lost, will be available on Hulu—what's up in the air now is which Disney shows will be, and which, if any, Pixar films will show up. Sadly not making the crossover are ESPN or ABC News.

What's interesting is who's fighting the deal: CBS, Comcast and Google are whispering in Disney CEO Bob Iger's ear that he shouldn't go exclusive with Hulu. CBS has a different online strategy—making their video available in lots of places and selling the ads themselves—which is why they're not keen on going exclusively Hulu. Kafka's sources say that CBS is committed to going that route, so even if they do wind up on Hulu—possible, with the pressure of being the last man standing, they won't go exclusive, at least not anytime soon. [All Things D]

As with photos, regular users are severely limited in what they can upload: two standard-quality uploads a month. Pro users can upload to their heart's content, but a 90-second cap remains in place for all uploads. The HD video feature is a natural, intelligent progression for the service, added just in time for the impending avalanche of HD-capable still cameras, which are less useful for creating long-form videos than they are for taking photos that just happen to, you know, move a little bit. Check out the fledgling (but spectacular) Flickr HD Pool, to see what I mean. [Yahoo! Blog via Business2Press —Video from Flickr User Mike Black]

LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION! MOVIES AND TV EPISODES
FROM NETFLIX DIRECTLY TO THE TV THROUGH TIVO DVRs AVAILABLE TODAY

Just in Time for the Holidays, Offering Brings Budget Conscious Entertainment to Consumers

ALVISO, Calif. - December 8, 2008 — After announcing a groundbreaking partnership in October with Netflix Inc., TiVo Inc. (NASDAQ: TIVO), the creator of and a leader in television services for digital video recorders (DVRs), today announced that subscribers to both Netflix and TiVo® Series3, TiVo HD, or TiVo HD XL can now access thousands of movies and TV episodes instantly streamed from Netflix directly to their TVs.

The service is being offered at no additional charge to customers who subscribe to both services. This morning subscribers can browse through an expanding library of more than 12,000 movies and TV episodes at www.netflix.com, add them to their Netflix instant Queue, and then watch them on TV with just a click of the TiVo remote. The library includes titles from every genre, with a modest selection of HD content available as well. Both standard and HD titles are expected to grow in the weeks and months ahead.

“With so much talk focusing on the economy these days, this partnership makes more sense than ever because it brings people more movies at home, offering substantially more entertainment options than cable or satellite," said Tara Maitra, GM and Vice President of Content Services at TiVo Inc. “TiVo offers consumers everything they need from just one box. Not only great content from Netflix, but also movies from The Walt Disney Studios and Amazon, music from Rhapsody, videos from YouTube and even pictures from Picasa Web Albums and Photobucket. And that’s all in addition to TiVo’s core functionality that made us a favorite in the first place. It adds up to a one-of-a-kind value.”

“Netflix offers an unbeatable combination of convenience, selection, and value, which now extends to TiVo customers,” said Netflix Chief Marketing Officer Leslie Kilgore. This partnership is a win-win-win for Netflix, TiVo, and consumers alike.”

Movies are streamed from Netflix through TiVo DVRs via wired or wireless broadband connection and a Netflix Queue-based user interface. Members visit the Netflix Web site to add movies and TV episodes to their individual instant Queues. Those choices will automatically be displayed on subscribers’ TVs and are available to watch instantly through the TiVo service. With the TiVo remote control users can browse their instant Queue, make selections right on the TV screen, as well as read synopses and rate movies. In addition, they have the option of pausing, fast-forwarding, rewinding and re-starting whenever they wish.

For more information on how to have movies instantly streamed from Netflix via your TiVo DVR visit www.tivo.com/netflix

YouTube fetched over 2.6 billion search queries that month, trumping Yahoo's 2.4 billion—though Google itself still reigns supreme with 7.6 billion queries (together, Google and YouTube field 10.2 billion). That's a hell of a lot of video, just on YouTube. And I don't even wanna know how many of those were looking for Rick Astley's magnum opus. [TG Daily]

As Ars called it, Hulu is a "corporate sandbox" loaded with content from NBC, News Corp., Sony, MGM, as well as their various subsidiary channels like FX, Sci-Fi Channel and so forth, offering anything from full episodes of Battlestar Galactica and Buffy to SNL Digital Shorts and an entire Russell Crowe flick, Master & Commander. It's Flash-based, it streams, just like YouTube, and it's ad-supported, with bumpers and "commercial breaks," just like the TV it's trying to ape. Despite the potential of being a corporate bomb, Hulu actually succeeds in a lot of ways. For one, the interface is pretty slick, the site itself not overwrought and easy enough to navigate, which is something of a miracle given how FUBAR productions of this sort typically turn out. The animations are smooth, with lots of scrollover popups and transparency, and buttons for all of the few things you can do with a video. Grays and blacks surround the video in a widescreen format, making it easier on your eyes.

Video and sound are clean, the 520x295 resolution for widescreen format clips definitely tolerable for the 42 minutes required to watch House or the like. More importantly, the streams have been exceptionally smooth. Bouncing around within vids is snappy, on few occasions taking longer than a second, and more often than not instantaneous. However, and it might be my imagination, video isn't quite as nice as it was on launch day a few days ago—a touch more pixellated—and seeking takes a bit longer. Still impressively small, more noticeable now.The potential deal killer here, the ads. (Also the best reason to wait for a review: I saw nary a frame of ads on launch night.) Their timing seems to be totally random. The initial three-second bumper is painless, promising "limited commercial interruption" thanks to X sponsor. But the in-show ad—so far in my experience no more than one 30-second clip per episode—could come at any time: within seconds of the bumper, halfway through, the first time you click ahead or so on. In that sense, it's maddening.

So why put up with ads? The content—and that's where Hulu's value and potential lies, but also its biggest shortcoming. Ars' problem with Hulu was the fact that it was a sandbox. I don't think that's necessarily bad, depending on what's in the sandbox and the playground rules—and what you expect to get out of it. I actually don't care to pull content out of Hulu's garden, beyond embedding clips on Gizmodo—I just want to be able to catch the Heroes ep I missed or peek a show I've heard about with a couple of clicks and no waiting.

Shortfall #1: It doesn't put shows up quickly enough after they air. It's still faster to grab a torrent right after Heroes airs on the East Coast than to wait for it to drop on Hulu (not that I've done that, lovely denizens of NBC's legal department). Solution? Air it on both simultaneously. It'll also help solve the tricky dilemma of measuring new vs. old, medium-shifting viewers.

Shortfall #2: It's an incomplete archive, with new episodes pushing off older ones. This is a balancing act because they don't want to cannibalize TV-on-DVD sales, but personally, if I haven't already bought a series on DVD I'm not going to. For instance, Buffy Season One is available in its entirety, but nothing beyond that, even though I wanna watch the musical episode. Heroes now only stretches back to the second ep of the current season.

The truly bold step to take in this little experiment is to throw open the content doors: Put up everything, and watch what happens. My guess is that it wouldn't adversely affect DVD sales—maybe iTunes, but according to NBC, they weren't making any money there anyway. Hell, throw in two thirty-second spots per clip, but bump the resolution. In other words: Make it more like TV.

Besides basically handing the online rental space over to Netflix, it leaves it the sole powerhouse movie rental company to remain profitable—Movie Gallery, the no. 2 B&M chain, is bankrupt—and therefore the undisputed heavyweight champion of the rental world. Make no mistake about it, folks, things are looking grim for the corner rental store.

It's not like Blockbuster was totally unaware of this. Moving into new distribution channels is increasingly looking like the only way to survive the video wars—hopefully Netflix doesn't stop following through on their bolder, more intuitive ideas, lest we write about it sinking with the physical media rental market altogether in several years. [Forbes via Consumerist, Flickr]

On a fast 7Mbps broadband connection, Joost was running well this morning. Its interface is easy to learn, and the video plays back full screen and streams smoothly. The quality leaves something to be desired, though—it's not even at the level of standard definition, and certainly not high definition. There's also not quite enough content on hand, with offerings from a couple of big names such as CBS and CNN, but mostly second- and third-tier content sources.

Even though this beta 1.0 is still a bit rough around the edges, we could still see the tremendous potential of this format. It actually feels like television, but everything is streaming. If this network and others like it are completely built out to where they can actually stream near-HD quality video, we might be seeing people abandoning cable for it. But not yet. [Joost, via Ars Technica]