That chill in the air can only mean one thing: Halloween -- and Election Day, for that matter -- is here. To get you in the spirit of things, we've put together two Spotlight pages, full of videos that will get you up-to-date on all things political and spooky. And, to pay tribute to one of Hollywood's legends, we've created a page dedicated to all of the Paul Newman movies made available to Hulu since his death.

With election day just around the corner, news reports about the candidates keep pouring in. Hulu's Election '08 Spotlight page is updated twice a day with the latest clips from MSNBC and Fox News, plus more humorous fare from shows like SNL, The Colbert Report, The Tonight Show and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart -- including Stewart's recent interview with Barack Obama. To get you in the mood to vote, Hollywood celebs have teamed up to bring you this PSA, featured in our "Daily Humor" section:

We've also put together a collection of all of the Paul Newman movies currently available on Hulu. We've been working to acquire as many of the legends films as we can since his death, and now we're able to offer his Oscar-nominated performance in Nobody's Fool, as well as his turn as Buffalo Bill Cody in Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians. The page also features three other titles, including Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!, Newman's second on-screen appearance with Joanne Woodward, his wife of 50 years.

And finally, with Halloween -- er, Huluween -- here, don't forgot to get your scare on over at our Huluween spotlight page. This week's videos include The Thing with Kurt Russell, the original Night of the Living Dead and, by popular demand, last week's SNL send-up of Vincent Price -- but there's a lot more to check out.

Happy Huluween,
Rebecca
rebecca.harper@hulu.com
Editor

Today is the one year anniversary of Hulu's launch as a private beta. On October 28 last year, we had zero users and a small and exhausted team that had worked around the clock for months to get the site out the door. As the clock turned past midnight, we stood around a desk and watched as one of the developers hit one last enter key and pushed our product into the wild.

A year later, some things have changed. We have many more users, content partners, and advertisers. Our catalog has ballooned many times over. To support this growth, we have many new faces in the office. We like to think the taco truck that stops by during our lunch hour added our street to their itinerary to support our growth.

When we visit college campuses on recruiting trips and say we're from Hulu, people no longer ask "What's that?" or think that it's a province of China (speaking of recruiting, if you are a great developer or know one who enjoys sunny weather, long walks on the beach, eating contests, Rock Band, ping pong, and foosball, do I have the place for you!). With a few moments to catch our breath, we painted our walls, hung some art, and moved the ping pong table from the hallway into its own room.

Some things haven't changed. We still eat a lot. We have one day of the week dedicated to donuts and another to bagels. The remainder of our waking hours are powered by those freakishly large containers of various foodstuffs from Costco. Our mission hasn't changed: we still want to make it easier and more fun to watch the shows and movies you love unabashedly, the ones you love in secret, the ones you don't know you love yet, and even the ones you don't love at all. Against that mission, we've made some progress, but we still have so much more work ahead of us than behind us. There are no "mission accomplished" banners hanging in our offices, only whiteboards filled with new ideas, designs, and to-do lists.

But on this, our first birthday, we wanted to thank some people. We want to thank our content partners, because without their willingness to clear content for us and their belief in the future growth of online distribution, none of this would be possible. We want to thank our advertisers, who help us to keep our content free for users and to fund our operations and growth. Their understanding of the value of presenting their products and services to our users is the second leg of the tripod that supports our business.

The third leg of the tripod is, of course, all of our users. Thank you all, not just for visiting our site and watching our videos but for your tens of thousands of e-mails offering suggestions, criticism, and support. Above all, we count on word of mouth for our growth. Thanks for being both our conscience and our advocates.

Lastly, I want to thank my coworkers for their hard work and around-the-clock passion. As we have employees stationed from the East Coast to the West Coast in the U.S. and on the opposite side of the world in Beijing, keeping up with them is truly a 24/7 job. I serve at the pleasure of a world-class team.

Most of the Hulu team, a year ago, just after the site launched in private beta:

Eugene

While we may go to the movies for the new releases, the popcorn and the Junior Mints, my favorite part has always been the moment when the lights dim and the Coke commercials give way to previews of coming attractions. With a new section devoted entirely to movie trailers, Hulu allows you to skip the $10 tickets (and the front-row seats on opening night), giving you access to upcoming, current and past movie trailers, all in one spot.

Hulu's Movie Trailers page gives you the chance to see what the buzz is all about for movies like Watchmen, Terminator: Salvation and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, plus many others.You can post these trailers to your Facebook account, MySpace page, or other social networking sites; embed them on your blog; or just email them to your friends. And, like any other video you share on Hulu, you can send or post the whole trailer or just the part you want your friends to see.

You can access the movie trailers page from hulu.com/trailers at any time. We'll make frequent updates, so you'll want to check back often. In the meantime, make up some popcorn, sit back, and enjoy the show; then use our discussion boards or reviews to share your thoughts with the rest of Hulu.

Rebecca
rebecca.harper@hulu.com
Editor

As both a media and politics junkie, I've always been interested in the evolution of the campaign advertisement. Today, spending on these ads has reached an all-time high, and it is hard to imagine a time when political campaign ads were a novelty.

It's even harder to imagine a time before negative campaign advertising. The attack ad is so ubiquitous in our political culture now that it is hard to imagine there could have even been a first. But in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson's campaign ran what is now known as the "Daisy Girl" ad which has come to be recognized as the first attack ad. Levied against his opponent, Barry Goldwater, the Johnson campaign's connection of the all-American girl counting flower petals with the countdown and subsequent atomic explosion was intended to reinforce the concept that a vote for Goldwater was a vote for nuclear war.

If you're as interested as I am in the history of political campaigns, then you'll love our new Historic Campaign Ads series, which brings you the best (or worst, depending on your point of view) of political advertising from the 1950s through the 1980s. Enjoy!

Travis

As many of you saw, Hulu was pretty much wiped off the face of the Internet tonight from about 6:45pm - 7:45pm PST. During that period, all *.hulu.com would not resolve and emails sent to any @hulu.com email address bounced.

So what happened? Well there's been some interesting theories about this that our users tweeted about during our outage including:

1. DanStasiewski: Hulu appears to be down. Should I get on the roof and wiggle the antenna?
2. JoeAnderson: Maybe bringing down Hulu.com will finally get me into the Evil League of Evil.
3. MattMusgrave: With Hulu down, productivity sky rockets.
4. benfortney: I think hulu said something bad about the chinese gov't.
5. (and another one) benfortney: I blame the Republicans for taking out Hulu.
6. demosthe: Stale DNS cache maybe?

If you guessed #6, then you'd be correct. Around 6:45pm, we accidentally deployed an incorrect DNS record and this change was cached out to public DNS servers causing all *.hulu.com domains (including our email server, SVN depot, the whole kitchen sink) to resolve into the ether.

With the help of our guardian angel (thanks Phil!), we fixed the DNS change but then had to wait helplessly for it to fully propagate which took a bit of time, during which we kind of felt like this:

Our sincere apologies to all the users this outage affected and hope things are back to normal for you. If not, drop me a line and we'll get you back up and running too.

Thanks again for your patience and understanding.

This month, we've put together some fright-inducing videos in celebration of Halloween. Compiled together on our Huluween Spotlight page, you can take your pick, from the campy to seriously scary, plus some of our favorite Halloween-themed TV episodes and clips as a little treat. From the Huluween Spotlight page, you can browse from week to week to week.

There, in Week 1, we have The Blob, where an evil Jell-O-like blob wreaks havoc on a small town. A 1988 remake of the original, it features just the right amount of gross-out horror, enough to keep you squirming all the way to Halloween. And for Entourage fans, Vince's brother, Johnny Drama -- or rather, Kevin Dillon -- has the lead alongside Shawnee Smith, who later put her horror skills to good use in Saw.

For more serious scares, we have something from the master of horror, Steven King, from Week 2. John Carpenter's Christine is the twisted love story of a teenager and his 1958 Plymouth Fury, Christine. The car demands his complete, unquestioned devotion, and she's hell-bent on stopping anyone who gets in her way. Christine's midnight rampages jumpstart the terror, from start to finish.

This week we went deeper into the horror archives, digging up a missing link: a Manchurian monster with unimaginable power. Though Horror Express has its schlocky moments, good-for-1972 production values deliver a some genuinely scary moments and even a few surprises.

We also added a comedy-horror film from the mid-'80s, The Toxic Avenger. Overlooked on its initial theatrical release, this campy movie is now considered a cult classic, leading to three sequels and even a TV cartoon, Toxic Crusaders. As superheroes prove to be big box-office draws, maybe we'll get to see the wimpy Melvin transform from scrawny mess to a crusading hulk once again.

In addition to a few more horror B-movies, we have Halloween-worthy episodes of Buffy, clips from The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror, and hilariously frightening set-ups from Scare Tactics. Turn down the lights, grab some candy corn and prepare to be scared!

Happy Huluween,
Rebecca
rebecca.harper@hulu.com
Editor

Saturday Night Live continued its long history of political cameos this week, with Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin making two appearances on the show. She follows the likes of Gerald Ford, Janet Reno and, most recently, Hillary Clinton, who have all dropped in to prove that they can handle some good-natured lampooning.

So how'd Gov. Palin do? Hulu has clips from both of her appearances this week, so you can be the judge. She appears first in the opener and again with Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler on Weekend Update. And though Palin didn't rap along with Poehler behind the news desk, she did raise the roof a little. Her opening sketch proves she's a good sport about all the jibes -- and even capable of delivering a good zinger.

Rebecca
rebecca.harper@hulu.com
Editor

As the election continues to dominate the national consciousness -- it's just over three weeks away now -- the presidential debates conclude with the third and final debate tomorrow night. Just as we did last week, Hulu is offering a live stream of the complete presidential debate (courtesy of our friends at Fox) starting at 9 p.m. EDT/6 p.m. PDT Wednesday. Working late hours? Tune in from your office PC. Putting in some time at the local coffee shop? Watch it live from your laptop. Too tied up to catch McCain and Obama live? We'll post the event in its entirety, along with clips and pre- and post-debate commentary, as soon as they become available following the live feed. You can find it all -- along with election-related standup and sketches -- on our Election '08 Spotlight page.

You can also embed the live stream on your blog or website and share it with your visitors. Just copy the embed code found at hulu.com/debate.html before the debates begin and paste it to your site. The countdown will appear until the action begins.

Enjoy,
Rebecca
rebecca.harper@hulu.com

They've been around long enough that most of us consider them old friends: Ernie and Bert, Big Bird and Snuffleupagus, Oscar and Grover. Striking the right chord of playtime and education, our colorful puppet pals taught us not only letters and numbers, but also to respect each other and to eat your veggies.

Now that Sesame Street is available on Hulu, you can revisit Elmo, The Count and Cookie Monster any time you want. We have 75 clips spanning the show's history, including some of the notable guest visits: Natalie Portman, Johnny Cash, Ben Stiller, Liam Neeson and American Idol's Ruben Studdard, among many others. They cover everything from exercise and art to asking questions and rhyming -- along with counting and the alphabet, of course.

So whether you need to brush up on your ABCs or just want an excuse to sing along, now you can find your way to Sesame Street through Hulu. Here's one of my favorites:

Have a favorite of your own? Share yours on the show's discussion board.

From guest blogger Kevin Smith, writer/director, Zack and Miri Make a Porno:
August 2, 1991. The day of my 21st birthday. Most folks elect to cut loose and enjoy the freedom that turning 21 affords. I, however -- being a total loser -- opted, instead, to take the 50-mile drive up the Jersey Turnpike with my friend Vincent Pereira so we could peep a film reviewed, quite favorably, by J. Hoberman in the Village Voice. It was unheard of in my neck of the woods to drive that far to see a movie (let alone a movie with zero movie stars in it), but the promise of a scene centered on a Madonna pap smear of questionable authenticity was bait enough to lure us from the Jersey 'burbs into the wilds of Manhattan-after-dark.

After overpaying for both parking and popcorn, we settled into what seats we could find together in the packed theater of a midnight screening. And once the trailer for Hal Hartley's Trust concluded, the Orion Classics logo lit up the screen and introduced me to my future. For the next 100 minutes or so, I was agog. My jaw literally hung open as this shaggy paean to those who follow the road not taken unspooled, offering me a glimpse into a free-associative world of ideas instead of plot, people instead of characters, and Nowheresville, Texas, instead of the usual California or New York settings most movies elected to feature (that "Nowheresville" was really Austin speaks volumes on how culturally bereft I was at the time). That night, director Richard Linklater and his film not only captured my imagination, he (and it) captured my heart -- not to mention kick-started my ambition. On the hour-long drive home from the theater that night, I realized what I wanted to do with my life: I wanted to be a filmmaker. That's the power of Slacker: if you let it, it'll change your life. It certainly changed mine.

So if you hate me and my films, blame Richard Linklater's Slacker. And if you love me and my films, thank Richard Linklater for Slacker. Either way, do yourself a favor and watch Richard Linklater's Slacker here on Hulu. Right now.

Kevin Smith
Writer/Director, Zack and Miri Make a Porno (opening October 31)

When we aren't obsessing over video quality at Hulu, we're often talking about the ins and outs of the upcoming election, discussing debates, campaign strategies, and generating more than a few debates ourselves.

We love an election, and it's been very important to us that we fulfill our civic duty during this very important time for our country. We want to help as much as we can in providing the information you need, when you want it, where you want it.

That's why we're proud to announce the launch of our Election '08 Spotlight page. With content from our news partners, NBC News, MSNBC and Fox News, we'll be adding all the content we can surrounding the election, for the first time in one place on Hulu, so you can have a bookmark that can provide you with the news you need to make your decision come November 4th.

When you're as nuts about quality as we are, it can lead to some long hours, and getting home in time to catch some of the really important events can be tough. In that vein, I'm even more excited to announce that for the first time in Hulu history, we'll be live streaming the second and third presidential debates, so you'll be able to catch one of the more important events of this election cycle. Check them out on our Election '08 Spotlight page. Hope to see you there!

Travis
travis.mccann@hulu.com
Hulu Political Correspondent

From Filmmaker David Modigliani:
Where did the idea for Crawford come from? I was duped. I didn't know George W. Bush wasn't from Crawford, Texas. When I found out that he'd moved to Crawford in 1999, a couple of months before announcing his candidacy for President, I realized how well his "small town values" political stagecraft had worked. I considered myself an educated citizen, but I could have sworn he was actually from Crawford. I had bought the folksy narrative without thinking twice.

I'm based in Austin, Texas, two hours from Crawford, so I had to pay a visit. I wanted to see this town he'd made into a symbol. And I wanted to make a film indicting him for it.

As it turns out, I found something much more compelling: the people of Crawford, Texas itself. I can't wait for all of you to meet these characters, to see the ways in which their lives change profoundly over the years. The kind of stuff you can't write or even imagine. The spontaneity, hilarity and authenticity of feeling that comes only from following real people for a long time.

Thankfully, Crawford is not a film about George W. Bush -- who wants another one of those? It's about a tiny town thrust into big-time politics. It's a look at the Bush era through the eyes of the people who've had a front row seat. It's about a town that goes from 15 minutes of fame to ground zero for 20,000 protesters, becoming a microcosm for national conflict in the process.

If you're looking for a political polemic or a filmmaker injecting himself into the story of a film, Crawford is not for you. If you're looking for a narrator's calm voice telling you what to think, Crawford is not for you. If you're looking for a pedagogical exercise, Crawford is not for you. If you're looking for a good story -- a gritty, funny story, told by great characters -- start watching and see what you find.

But first, let me say this: as a first-time filmmaker, I'm proud and I'm excited to premiere Crawford on Hulu. Over the last year, I've seen how the traditional models of film distribution are breaking down, how theatrical releases are failing, great films are going unwatched and distributors are closing their doors. And yet, simultaneously, I've seen that the audience for independent film is at an all-time high. There's a buffer between quality content and an audience that's hungry for it. Hulu's excitement about Crawford and their choice to make it their first premiere will help us cut through the morass out there and connect all of you to a film I think you'll love. These are exciting times.

Crawford will be able to play in Hulu's high quality player on Facebook pages, fly over email and embed into blogs and websites. A lot of people are philosophizing about the future of film distribution; we're doing it right here, right now.

This release is a true experiment and we're excited to have all of you as partners and collaborators. After three years of filmmaking I can finally say: this is yours, now. Take it and run with it!

David Modigliani
Producer/Director of Crawford

You asked, we listened. One of the most popular requests we've received since Hulu's launch has been for an easier way to manage queued videos, and a few new features will bolster your queue's functionality. Now you can rearrange your play order by renumbering the videos in Your Queue. Once you've renumbered the videos, simply click the "update order" button and your videos will be rearranged. You can also move a video to the top of your queue by clicking on the arrow button that appears to the left of your numbered playlist. To start streaming your playlist continuously, just click on any video. Your videos will start playing in order, starting with that video.

You can also remove several videos at once. Check off the videos you want to remove, then click on the "remove" button above your queue; the selected videos will be taken out of your queue. If you have a number of expired videos in your queue (we keep those there so you aren't surprised to see a video's missing), you can click on the "removed expired videos" button -- no need to select the videos -- to pull them from your queue in one easy step.

To make managing your queue a little easier, there are two ways to view your list: The default view, with thumbnail images of each video, and a new list view. The difference? The thumbnail view spreads your queue over several pages if necessary, while the list view shows your entire queue (without images) on one page for easy reordering. You can change your view by clicking on the buttons located to the right of side of the page, up near the Subscription Alerts settings.

We've also split out our queue alerts so you can opt out of expiration alerts if you'd rather not receive them. When you turn on Subscription Alerts, we'll send a daily e-mail whenever we add a new video from your subscription list to your queue. Expiration Alerts will notify you when a video in your queue is set to expire in seven days. You can activate these alerts in your Profile under the "Privacy and Settings" or "Queue" tabs.

The check boxes that allow you to remove select items from your queue also let you change your privacy settings from public to private for the selected videos, just in case you want to keep those Bring It On clips to yourself. If you prefer to keep everything private all the time, you can modify your lists' privacy settings from your Profile's Privacy and Settings tab. Note: Your settings on the Privacy and Settings tab override any settings you make in your queue, even when your queued videos say "public."

And finally, we now offer relevant availability messaging at the top of show pages, letting you know when you can expect the latest episode of your favorite series. Take a look at the show page for House, hulu.com/house, for an idea.

If you haven't already, check out the new Queue settings and let us know what you think at feedback@hulu.com.

Rebecca
Hulu Editor
rebecca.harper@hulu.com