Hulu sends your TV out to play with other kids
By Dave Jeyes
This month marks the first anniversary of Hulu and it’s time for the site to start growing up. The site has launched social features so that your TV can make friends while taking the number two spot in online video behind YouTube, which is still the man of the house.
Hulu’s social networking features now allow you to add friends and interact with them on the service. Then you can see what shows your friends are adding to their queues to find out what shows are hot.
The profiles are very clean and simple, featuring statistics about your activity on the site including the number of friends, subscriptions, reviews and ratings you have. The activity also goes into an activity stream that is shared with your friends.
It’s a great addition to the service and is reminiscent of Netflix’s way of sharing social recommendations along with Facebook-style activity feeds. With the number of new users on Hulu, this is a great way to make the site even more sticky.
Hulu has also seen truly impressive growth in the month or so since its commercials were a big hit during the Superbowl. In the month of February, Hulu streamed 33 percent more videos to a much wider audience.
The massive growth of Hulu last month vaulted the site past both Yahoo and MySpace to take a distant second behind YouTube. This is quite impressive as the leaders in the online video marketplace were fairly consistent until Hulu came along.
Hulu is a joint venture between NBC Universal and Fox Interactive and represents big media’s arrival on the Internet. It’s taken a while for so-called ‘old media’ to understand how to engage users online and Hulu ‘gets it,’ at least mostly.
A spat with startup media center developer Boxee earlier in the month raised the ire of Boxee’s loyal community. Hulu asked that their content be removed from the media center application, ostensibly to protect the television networks’ dominance on the television.
Nevertheless, Hulu has taken its place as a top online video provider and the number one site offering studio-grade production value in the Wild West that is the Internet.
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