For those of you who have been keeping up with the changes and updates on Hulu.com, you may have noticed that we’ve nearly tripled our content library since our beta launch. Most recently, we’re excited to welcome Sony Pictures Television to our list of content providers with several old-time favorites such as Who’s the Boss?, The Partridge Family, What’s Happening!! and NewsRadio, as well as minisodes (5 minute re-cap clips) of Married with Children and I Dream of Jeannie. Stay tuned, as this is just the beginning of a lot of great Sony shows that will be added in the next couple of weeks.

For you fans of reality programming, we’ve got the very first episodes of the hottest new series to help you kick off a great season. American Gladiators with Hulk Hogan and Trump’s new spin with Celebrity Apprentice are both available the morning after broadcast. Omarosa and Gene Simmons . . . not a combination I would have guessed I would ever see, but I have to admit that it’s fascinating to watch! The list goes on with NBC’s Deal or No Deal, Bravo’s Make Me a Supermodel and E! Entertainment’s Snoop Dogg’s Father Hood, and more.

As the content available from Hulu continues to grow, I’m really excited about what our unique combination of breadth and depth can offer to our users. Some of these shows take me back and others I’m discovering for the first time-- it’s exciting that it’s becoming trivially easy to enjoy many of these oldies like never before. As an example, take a look at these videos from one of the most talented comedians of the last twenty years . . . a quick tribute to a guy for whom I have a huge amount of respect.

The team is still working hard to bring you more of the shows, clips, and movies you love, so be sure to check back often!

Andy
andy.forssell@hulu.com

Improving the user experience is a never-ending mission. We wanted to point out a few new Hulu site features that we think will make it easier for you to find, enjoy, and share your favorite programming.

First, we've upgraded our show pages to make it easier to sift through the sometimes hundreds of videos available for each show. Our video carousels for episodes and clips now allow you to sort the results to see the most popular, new, or highly rated videos first. We've also added pagination to the right and left arrows so you have a sense of how long the carousel runs, and we have a new design for our season filters so you can restrict the videos in a carousel to those from one particular season.

The most apparent addition is the new text list view for episodes and clips. Carousels are great for surfacing a small set of videos, but not efficient for browsing through, say, 400+ Saturday Night Live videos unless you're a mouse-clicking addict. We're always happy to see our content volume expand, but it was high time to supplement our carousels with an alternative browsing interface. The new list view can be sorted by clicking on the column headers, and you can reverse sort by clicking on the column header a second time. You can put your cursor over any text listing for a video and see the thumbnail and description for that video in a small mouseover window, and the far right column allows you to quickly add many videos to your playlist.

To make it easier for you to navigate to our new show pages, we've added a few wrinkles. The first is that searches for a specific show title surface a link to that show in the upper left of the search results page. That appears for shows available both on and off our site. We've also created shortcut URLs to make it easy to navigate directly to a show page. Simply add a show title after http://www.hulu.com/ and you'll go directly to the page for that program. For example, www.hulu.com/30rock or www.hulu.com/familyguy .

We also now allow you to review not just individual videos but entire shows. Scroll to the bottom of a show page and write a user review to let the world know how you feel about a program. For example, we'd love to hear how you feel about some of the classic TV shows we've added just this week: Married With Children, NewsRadio, Partridge Family, and Who's the Boss.

Finally, we've also made it easier to select your own clips to e-mail or embed. Click on the embed or share button while watching a video and you'll see the new, expanded interface. The longer timeline allows you to set start and end points with up to one second of precision, and you can use right and left arrow keys on your keyboard to scrub forwards and backwards one second a time. No longer do you need the mouse-operating skills of an open heart surgeon to select the exact clip you want. As before, you can click on the preview button to watch your custom clip before sharing or embedding it.

Armed with the new clip selection tools, we selected a clip to share with you, a musical number from the last episode of 30 Rock.

We've still got a long list of site features and improvements in the works. As always, we love to hear great ideas from our users, so please do send suggestions and requests for how to improve our service to feedback@hulu.com.

Cheers,

Eugene
eugene.wei@hulu.com

We're excited (and incredibly honored) to announce that we've won the Crunchie award for Best video startup at the 2007 Crunchies! The awards show, held on Friday at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco, was an inaugural event organized by TechCrunch, GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, and VentureBeat to "recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year". Most importantly, it was users who picked the winners by casting online votes so thank you all for your support!

We were on hand for the fun and festivities of the ceremony that featured industry heavyweights (like Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Rose), a terrific performance by the Richter Scales, and a very entertaining acceptance speech by Fake Steve Jobs. But the highlight of the evening for me - besides picking up the award of course... - was getting to meet MC Hammer (yes, you read that right) at the after party.

Again, on behalf of the entire Hulu team, thanks so much for your votes and we look forward to living up to these expectations in 2008.

Eric Feng
eric.feng@hulu.com

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Eric Feng
eric.feng@hulu.com