(For updates on the latest news around the Hulu Facebook Connect integration, please go here: http://blog.hulu.com/2011/07/01/hulu-facebook-connect-update)

Do you remember when?

I knew Dwight’s stint as manager of the Scranton office would end with hilarious results. But did I see that coming? Not in a million years. But of course, the moment he strutted out with his holster (and gun!), it was clear that Dwight’s dream would come to an end with explosive results. And when the gun went off—luckily damaging only Andy’s hearing—I immediately jumped on Facebook to see what my friends had to say. Of course, this exact moment was the talk of Hulu in the morning.

TV has always been a social experience. We gather with friends and family to watch our favorite shows, sporting events, movies, and news. When we get to work, we meet around the water cooler and chat about Tracy Jordan’s latest stunt in the previous night’s 30 Rock. We text each other during the results of The Voice, and we blog about the latest politician skewered in Jon Stewart’s opening monologue.

Today, we are making the Hulu experience even more social with Facebook on Hulu.

Interact. We are excited to announce a new feature that is the first-of-its-kind and one that we think will become a staple at Hulu going forward. One of the most exciting features we are launching today is the ability to comment on a specific moment in time while watching any video on Hulu, and with one click, instantly share those remarks — and the relevant video moment from the program — on Facebook for all your friends to see. When you comment on a Hulu video, that exact moment will appear on Facebook so your friends can jump in and react right away. And since friends can respond to your comments, you can have those water cooler conversations online at any time. We’ve been using this feature in test mode here at Hulu HQ for a bit…and we are officially addicted. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Personalize. Now you can easily log on to Hulu—or create a new account—using your Facebook account. From there, you’ll be able to interact with all of your Facebook friends. You’ll log into a homepage tailored to you, where you can see your friends’ favorite shows, and start conversations with anybody who follows the same shows you do.

Discover. I discovered some of my favorite shows (like Coupling—the UK version, of course) because a friend recommended them. With Facebook on Hulu, you can introduce your friends to shows you’re rooting for, and discover new favorites with the help of your friends, too.

Connect. To link your Hulu and Facebook accounts, use the “Connect” button on your next visit to Hulu. Or visit http://www.hulu.com.

The entire social experience on Hulu is being supported by our partners at Coors Light and Microsoft’s decision engine Bing. Bing is also providing a free 1-month Hulu Plus subscription to users who make the decision to “go social” by signing up for Facebook on Hulu.

We’re very excited about the above efforts which we believe make TV fundamentally more social. Let us know what you think!

Whenever I wear my official Hulu jacket, people stop me to ask, “What’s it like to work at Hulu?” And I usually smile and think, “Dude, you have no idea!” And then I say something like, “Imagine being on a rocket-powered roller coaster with lots of surprise tunnels and unexpected turns.” It’s hard to convey the electric vibe of being on a team that is building a revolutionary service in a transforming industry, full of worthy competitors and complex partnerships. It’s like working in the future, when it’s not actually here yet. There is no flat or normal. It’s rapid-fire building. It’s spurts of anticipation. It’s bursts of speed that make your stomach jump in your throat. And for me, it’s an awesome job.

In just over three years, Hulu has become a hotbed of innovation from a business and technical perspective. So it makes sense that job candidates and press alike are increasingly interested in how we do stuff inside Hulu. Recently, Fast Company detailed our company culture, “Best Jobs Ever” profiled us, and Seattle Met Magazine did a writeup on our new Seattle development office as part of their 2011 “Best Places to Work … and Play” issue. And on top of all of that, WorldBlu has certified Hulu as a “democratic workplace.” Through all of this coverage, we’ve started to clarify a few things about what we are doing, and since we get asked about our culture and approach to management so often, I thought it would be good to put it out there for anyone who is curious about Hulu “behind the scenes.”

What type of people work at Hulu?
We are builders, entrepreneurs, and innovators, driven to surprise and delight our customers with a premium quality entertainment experience. We believe that who we hire is the single most important decision we make on a continual basis, so when looking for new “Hulugans,” we view candidates through two lenses:

• 1. We hire for values. As detailed in “What Defines Hulu,” our values are real and ever-present. We look for people who obsess over quality and customer service. They trade stories of greatness in these areas like some people discuss sports. And, we look for people who have a relentless desire for finding better ways of doing whatever it is they do.

• 2. We hire extraordinary people. We look for people who have developed and demonstrated an extraordinary ability that is of value to our team. Every team member shares a deeply held belief that his or her individual efforts are not sufficient to accomplish our mission. From this extraordinary ability and sincere belief, Hulugans are humble and collaborative by nature, in the face of our audacious goals.

As we grow to meet the challenges ahead, we need the best and brightest talent on the Internet. Every Hulugan is expected to apply his or her unique skills to build something that makes it easier for people to find, enjoy and share the world’s premium content. Hulu has a small team of people who have excelled in a diverse array of both startup and corporate environments to give us speed, strength, and agility in our mission. Check out the video we created to capture the spirit of working at Hulu:

How do we get work done?
There are several patterns in how we work that are critical to our success so far:

• - Teams solve difficult problems better than individuals. We believe in small teams and big ideas, and that familiarity breeds innovation. Our teams are not just a format for working together, they are the best way to manage the ambiguity and uncertainty inherent in our business.

• - Freedom to build. We maintain an open and creative environment at the office — it’s energetic, fun, and a little bit chaotic. And very productive. Everyone has the freedom to provide input into what work we do and how we do it. We depend on the great judgment, healthy debate, and entrepreneurial work ethic of our people to keep our work sensible, prioritized, and on track.

• - Interesting work leads to growth. People do their best work when it’s interesting and challenging; and this naturally results in personal and professional growth. Hulugans appreciate the chance to employ and hone multiple skill sets and are encouraged to tackle new things that help both Hulu and each other grow.

• - Reward great work with bigger challenges. Every Hulugan has the opportunity to take ownership of a project and make it bigger and better. This is what meritocracy looks like in action: do well, keep going, earn credibility, get more responsibility.

• - We are part of something bigger. We believe in giving back. We fully support and are a vibrant part of the larger community. Our developers work on many open source projects and have built much of our infrastructure using open tech stacks. We strive to make improvements in the communities where we live through individual and group philanthropy projects.

What is the work environment like?
We’ve constructed a workplace that supports a balance between three work modes: heads down focus, active collaboration, and serendipitous interaction. This means nobody gets an office to hide in, but we have lots of private conference rooms for spirited debate and creative whiteboarding. We have generous amounts of open communal space where Hulugans break out, relax, and play around, because we know that creative minds are more effective when they have regular distractions. Our kitchen is in the center of everything to encourage regular visits and spur connection.* When you enter our office, the first thing you notice is a wall of portraits with every team member showing off a bit of his or her personality. From this gigantic photo wall, even a casual visitor will quickly notice that our people are our most precious asset.

What benefits does Hulu provide?
Everyone who works for Hulu owns a part of the company. Thus, our benefits reflect an “ownership” culture, which means that we treat each other as high-judgment owners who can make decisions as owners. Here’s a couple of examples:

• - “Be Well:” Everyone on our team may expense up to $600 per year on “being well.” This means different things to different people. If training for a marathon helps one person be well, but signing up for a yoga class helps another person be well, then they each can expense up to $600 annually on that activity.

• - “Take the time off you need to perform at your best:” As a start-up, our team works really hard. And within our ownership culture, it is strange to dictate how many days someone can take for vacation or a personal day. Rather than have no time off policy, our team told us they need a target to aim for so they don’t feel bad leaving their team behind. So we set our policy to a minimum of 32 paid days off, and team members may take additional time as needed by discussing with their manager.

We strive to do anything and everything to make Hulu a place where builders come to build great things. This is a standard measured by the builders themselves, who are passionate and relentless in their desire to always make things better. And that is what we mean when we say we have an “ownership” culture. We are our own best critics and as a team we are all improving Hulu together.

If you liked what you just read, and are interested in joining us, please check out our jobs page.

* We have done extensive research to determine that Hulugans are strongly attracted to free food.

Since we released the Hulu Plus^™ subscription service as a preview in July, the Hulu team has been hard at work extending the device footprint, refining existing applications, and adding to the content lineup, all while listening to feedback from our users, content partners, and advertisers.

I am happy to announce that today we are launching the Hulu Plus subscription service out of preview. With this launch, we are proud to offer our users the only subscription service with the full current season of hit TV shows like Glee, Modern Family, The Office, House, 30 Rock, Grey’s Anatomy, and more, with minimal ad-load, across computers, TVs, mobile phones, and tablets.

We’ve always been committed to providing our users the best value possible in all of our offerings, and we’re excited to announce several milestones in that goal for Hulu Plus.

First, the monthly price for Hulu Plus moving forward is just $7.99. Any current subscribers who joined during our preview period will receive a credit for the difference from the $9.99 preview price. This credit will automatically be applied to their next billing cycle.

Hulu Plus is now available on devices that have an installed base of over 50 million. Today, Hulu Plus launches on Roku. All PlayStation 3 owners with a PlayStation Network account, which is free, can download the Hulu Plus application. In the months to come, Hulu Plus will be coming to Internet-connected Vizio, LG Electronics, and Panasonic Blu-ray players and HDTVs; TiVo Premiere DVRs; the Xbox 360; and Western Digital’s WD TV Live Hub Media Center and WD TV Live Plus Network Media Player, with many more mobile phones, tablets, set-top boxes, and Internet-connected devices to be announced.

We haven’t forgotten about our existing device lineup and applications, either. Over the next week, updates to the Samsung, PlayStation 3, and Apple iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch Hulu Plus apps will be available, bringing a variety of bug fixes and feature and performance enhancements.

Now that the fall TV season is underway, Hulu Plus is the only subscription service to offer every episode of new shows from ABC, Fox, and NBC, including Raising Hope, No Ordinary Family, and The Event, in addition to established favorites like House, Glee, and Modern Family. We’ve also added back seasons of hit shows including Monk, Psych, and Battlestar Galactica, and by year-end, the lineup will include every episode from all 36 seasons of Saturday Night Live.

We realize that for many users, Hulu Plus represents a markedly new way to keep up with their favorite TV shows. To make it as easy and risk-free as possible for users to try out this service, we’re pleased to share the following special offers:

• One free week trials for all new subscribers. In addition, current subscribers who joined during the preview period will receive a credit for one week of Hulu Plus toward their next month’s subscription.
• Two free weeks of Hulu Plus for both current subscribers and friends they invite through our referral program. Subscribers can learn more by clicking on the “Referrals” tab on their Hulu profile page.
• 11 weeks ($20 worth) of free Hulu Plus with the purchase of a Sony BRAVIA connected TV or Blu-ray player through January 31, 2011. (See sony.com/huluplus.)
• One free month of Hulu Plus with the purchase of a Roku device through December 15, 2010. (See roku.com/hulu.)

We’re highly encouraged by the response we’ve received to the Hulu Plus service during the preview period. Though the service has only been in preview for part of this year, Hulu Plus is already accounting for a material percentage of Hulu’s overall business. But we’re even more excited about where we plan to take the service in the months and years to come. This is just one more step in the journey to reinvent TV. We hope you’ll join us.

Jason Kilar
CEO, Hulu
jason@hulu.com

Perhaps when you think of Seattle your taste buds prepare themselves for a freshly brewed espresso or a not-so-simple soy-decaf-single-shot-one-pump-vanilla-iced-latte. Or perhaps Seattle conjures images of the halls of Seattle Grace Hospital, where lives are saved and relationships flatline. Or maybe, if you’re like me, your thoughts rush to Cuban sandwiches at Paseo, the inspiring view at Gasworks Park, and the incredible engineering and startup communities that thrive in this rainy Emerald City.

As someone who called Seattle my home for nearly eight years, I’m truly excited to announce that Hulu will be opening a development center in Seattle by the end of the year.

While most people think of TV shows when they think of Hulu, at Hulu we pride ourselves in being a technology company first and foremost. Over the last year, we’ve scaled our service to handle over 30 million users and over 1 billion streams per month. We’ve architected a content distribution platform to store, transcode, and deliver petabytes of video on commodity hardware. We even managed to launch our own video ad server while building a subscription service that provides users with unfettered access to their favorite shows on PCs, TVs, gaming consoles, and mobile devices.

But despite all our progress to date, our toughest and most interesting technical challenges continue to lie ahead of us. The online video experience today is only a fraction of what we think it can and should be, and we’re looking for talented people who, like us, are inspired to invent the future.

We’ve always known that Hulu is defined by its people and its culture. We believe that the talented engineers of the Seattle area embody our philosophy, and we have firsthand knowledge to back that up: nearly 50 percent of our developers in Los Angeles were once Seattleites building enterprise database servers, operating systems and web frameworks.

Rest assured we will leave no coffee shop unchecked and no coffee bean unturned as we search for the brightest and best software developers out there. If you’re one of them and are interested in a new adventure, stop over at our job site or ping me at richard@hulu.com.

Richard Tom
VP, Platform Technology

Everyone on the Hulu team shares three things in common. I’ll cover two of those immediately. We’ll get to the last one at the end of this post.

First, we are proud to say that we love TV shows. TV shows entertain billions of people across the globe and are among the most durable, high quality forms of storytelling in our society. TV shows play a significant role in billions of people’s daily routines.

Second, we believe that the TV show experience — while already great — has the opportunity to be even better. We have great conviction that consumers should be able to watch the TV shows they’d like to watch, whenever they want to watch them, wherever they want to watch them. The Hulu team has taken that conviction and built a very special service we’re calling Hulu Plus. The Hulu Plus service is our answer to the question of “What if your favorite TV shows loved you back?”

Hulu Plus is not a replacement for Hulu.com. Hulu Plus is a new, revolutionary ad-supported subscription product that is incremental and complementary to the existing Hulu service. For almost all of the current broadcast shows on our service, Hulu Plus offers the full season. Every single episode of the current season will be available, not just a handful of trailing episodes. Now there’s never a bad time to jump in on a hot new show like Modern Family (which I recommend highly). From Family Guy to Glee, from The Office to 30 Rock, from Grey’s Anatomy to Desperate Housewives, from Parks & Recreation to Parenthood, from House to Saturday Night Live, and dozens of other hits, the best time to jump in on any series is any time, and with any episode, that’s right for you.

As a Hulu Plus subscriber, you’ll now also have access to back seasons or full runs of some of TV’s greatest shows. All nine seasons of The X-Files. All three seasons of Arrested Development. Ten seasons of Law and Order: SVU. All five seasons of Ally McBeal. Seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and three seasons of Roswell. Every episode ever of Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives. Classic skits from the first five and most recent five seasons of Saturday Night Live. The list goes on. This is all on top of hundreds of shows already on Hulu.com today. It’s a treasure chest in the cloud for TV lovers.

How can someone watch all these TV shows? The only possible way is if someone could pull up these shows wherever they were, on whatever device they happened to have available. That’s why we’re excited to announce that Hulu Plus subscribers can now watch their favorites through more than just the browser on their Mac or PC.

Let’s start in your living room. You’re sitting down for dinner, and you’d like to pull Hulu up on your TV. Today you’d have to plug a computer into the TV and try to connect the audio from your computer to your sound system. It’s certainly doable, but it’s not as easy as it could be. Starting today, Hulu Plus subscribers who own select Samsung Internet-connected TVs and Blu-ray players can download a Hulu Plus application from the Samsung app store and start streaming Hulu Plus directly.

Now let’s say you migrate from the living room to your den or bedroom or patio where you don’t have a TV. You can always pull up Hulu Plus on your laptop, but starting today you can access Hulu content via Wi-Fi or 3G on another device: the Apple iPad. I’ve been watching Hulu on my iPad for several weeks now, and I’ve watched more TV through the iPad than any other device.

Now let’s head out of the house and onto the road. Wouldn’t it be nice if, while you were waiting for your coffee order at the local cafe, you could finish watching that episode you started watching that morning on your iPad? Starting today, if you’re a Hulu Plus subscriber and you own an iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4 or third-generation iPod Touch, you can.

The Hulu Plus app on the iPhone streams over 3G and Wi-Fi. It’s TV shows in the palm of your hand. A spare five minutes will never be as boring again. You can start watching a show on your HDTV one night, pick up where you left off on your laptop at lunch, watch another chunk on the bus ride home on your iPhone, and finish watching in bed on your iPad. The time to watch your favorite shows is any time you want.

These are the devices shipping with Hulu Plus today. But this is just the first step in our mission to bring you TV wherever you are. We are already hard at work on porting Hulu Plus to other devices and platforms, with PlayStation 3 coming soon. But that’s a story for another day.

More content. More devices. But that’s not all. We want to take full advantage of beautiful display devices like your HDTV connected to your Samsung Blu-ray player, or your iPad. So for all Hulu Plus subscribers, we’ll now stream all native HD content in 720p high definition.

The last question, and an obvious one, is how much this costs. We wanted Hulu Plus to be priced for as many people as possible. We’re thrilled to be able to bring all of this to you for the price of just $9.99 a month.

How do you sign up for Hulu Plus? Starting today, we’re issuing invitations to become a Hulu Plus subscriber. If you’re interested, you can request an invitation here. To ensure we’re offering the best experience for all our Hulu Plus customers, we’ll be sending out invitations in waves [hint: if you follow Hulu on Twitter ( www.twitter.com/hulu) or “Like” Hulu on Facebook ( www.facebook.com/hulu), we’ll be handing out invites to a random set from each of those groups from time to time over the coming months]. We’ll be sending out as many invitations as we can each week, and as soon as we’re ready, we’ll remove the need for an invitation and start bringing in new subscribers without delay.

At the start, I mentioned I’d come back to the third thing that all of us at Hulu have in common. That third thing is this: we believe that any lasting solution to the challenge of making TV show discovery and viewing dramatically easier has to work for all three of our customers, and those are our end users, our advertisers, and our content suppliers.

With Hulu Plus, we believe we’ve met that goal. For our end users, we’re offering them the most convenient way to access their favorite shows, on devices they love, in high definition, at a fair price. For our advertisers, who allow us to keep our Hulu Plus price low with the support of ad revenue, we offer one of the world’s most effective advertising platforms, with the ability to speak effectively to users across a variety of devices, anywhere they happen to be. And finally, for our content partners, we offer revenues that compensate them fairly for bearing the cost of producing the shows we love.

Is our work done? Not even close. There are more shows to license, more countries to expand into, and more product features to build. And we will.

But for today, we just want to share our latest project with you. We think it’s pretty great. We hope you do, too.

Jason Kilar
jason@hulu.com
CEO, Hulu

One of the first phone calls I made over 3 years ago when Hulu was not yet Hulu was to Eric Feng. Eric and I got to know each other in Seattle when he was at Microsoft and I was at Amazon. In the weeks following my phone call to Eric in May of 2007, I traveled to Beijing, China, and that was when Eric officially jumped aboard as Hulu’s founding CTO. Eric and I also decided that afternoon to start a software development center in Beijing in support of what was to become Hulu. Below is a picture from that afternoon:

It has been an incredible 3 years, and Eric has done what only world-class builders can do. Specifically, he has embraced and nurtured a highly unique culture; he has built and grown an extremely talented team; he has enabled those builders to build great things; he has relentlessly pursued a better way each and every day. Hulu’s technologists are leading the charge in both Los Angeles and Beijing, creating and innovating the media service that we feel the world both needs and deserves.

Over the past year, a very unique opportunity has emerged for Eric, and he’s going to pursue it with my full support. I’ll let him share the news with you below via an email he sent to the Hulu team members a few hours ago. Eric will be departing Hulu in mid July, a little over a month from now.

I want to take this moment to say thank you to Eric for all that he has done for Hulu. In addition to being a world-class builder with an atypically high quality bar, he also happens to be a friend to all of us at Hulu. I am extremely proud of what he has done and how he has done it. Yes, I would prefer that Eric be at Hulu until he is old and gray. But often in professional life, that is not the way it goes. We’ve been planning for this day for some time now, and our deep and talented technology team is well prepared to ensure that we remain obsessed in our relentless pursuit of a better way. Rich Tom, who has been with Hulu since the beginning, will be leading our platform’s technology. Eugene Wei, who has also been with Hulu since the start, will be leading our audience business, which includes the consumer-facing web service and the many things that it comprises.

Below is a photo of Eric and me in China last week at our Beijing Development Center, now a thriving center for innovation located in the shadows of Tsinghua University, one of the top Computer Science programs in the country. I am so proud of Eric and the teams he has built, both in the States and in Beijing.

Thank you Eric, for everything.

Jason Kilar
jason@hulu.com
CEO, Hulu

Below is the email that Eric shared with the Hulu team a few hours ago:

During my nearly three years at Hulu, I’ve written a lot of emails. At last count, it was more than 33,000 messages on every imaginable topic from product specs to patent apps to performance reviews to press inquiries. I even once wrote an email to MC Hammer (yes, *that* Hammer …) about break-dancing videos. But this email is one I never thought I’d write.

It’s with a jumble of feelings that I’m announcing I will be leaving Hulu this summer and joining the incredibly talented Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers team as a partner and technical advisor to Vice President Al Gore. I’ve been able to share this news with many of you personally, but for others it may come as a surprise. For me, it’s still a surprise, and I’ve known about this longer than anyone.

Leaving Hulu was a difficult decision. My time here has been the most exciting, challenging and rewarding professional experience of my life. I could not be more proud of all that we’ve accomplished from our inauspicious beginning in the summer of 2007, to becoming the PC World product of the year, a Fast Company most innovative company, a Time Magazine invention of the year, and, most importantly, a brand that millions of people are so passionate about. From two team members to two hundred, from Beijing to Los Angeles, from an idea to a real sustainable business, working at Hulu has truly been a once-in-a-lifetime privilege. However I’ve recently been blessed with a rare and unexpected thing in life: a *twice* in a lifetime privilege.

Through coincidence and good fortune that continues to humble me, I’ve been offered the chance to contribute to the amazing innovation Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is helping pioneer, from new Internet and mobility ventures to life science breakthroughs to solutions for the Global Warming climate crisis. I’m eager to continue exploring my passion for digital technologies, and I’ve long aspired to become involved in the transformative solutions around greentech. I just never knew how or when that might happen until now. And I never thought now would come this soon.

July 16th will be my last day at Hulu, and while I’m thrilled at the new challenges that await, part of me will always regret leaving. But in this case, regret is a good thing — a very good thing. Because it’ll be a constant reminder that my time at Hulu was always more than a job; it was an experience. The people I worked with were more than my colleagues, they were my friends and family. And what we have accomplished was important, but not nearly as important as how we accomplished it. We have lived each day at Hulu with a hunger for innovation, an obsession with quality, a never-ending commitment to our customers and, above all else, an appreciation for the amazing journey we were on together. In the end, it’s the journey that mattered more than the destination, and that’s made all the difference.

My journey with Hulu will soon be over, but I leave knowing the team will continue on towards inspiring successes that are sure to exceed my wildest expectations. And you can count me as one of many passionate Hulu users who will be glued to my computer, tuning in every day, and eagerly awaiting the great things the team does next.

Your friend. Anytime. Anywhere.

Eric

PS. 非常感谢大家在过去几年里面的努力和帮助！ 祝福你们未来一切顺利，希望不久的将来还有机会见面，一起去卡拉ok，后会有期。

Today we’re releasing several exciting updates to Hulu, most notably a new version of the Hulu video player. We’ve posted an overview of the new player, complete with an introductory video, here. And you can experience the changes for yourself throughout the site. Given the breadth of the changes, what I thought I’d do here on the blog is give more of a behind-the-scenes look at the thinking that went into the new releases.

Let’s start with the new Hulu player. Around the office we referred to this as Project Voltron after the ’80s animated TV series. Just as five robot lions combined to form Voltron in that show, many different components came together to make up the new Hulu player. A convergence of several forces — the availability of new technologies, lingering ideas from the product team, and user feedback — underlie this refresh of our player, but the primary motivation remained the same as always: elevate the experience of watching videos on Hulu.

Adaptive Bitrate Streaming
The new player is written in ActionScript 3, and among other things, that enabled us to launch adaptive bitrate streaming. Previously, we could downshift the bitrate of our video stream if we detected the user experiencing video playback issues for reasons like diminished internet bandwidth. With adaptive bitrate streaming, we can now shift video bitrates and resolution up and down continually to match the user’s bandwidth. In the hierarchy of video playback issues, we believe frame rate inconsistency or video stuttering is more disruptive to users than a decrease in resolution, and adaptive bitrate streaming is designed for that prioritization.

You can turn on adaptive bitrate streaming in our new video settings menu in the player. That menu also allows you to force the player to stream at a fixed resolution of 480p, 360p, or 288p, but we recommend that you select adaptive bitrate streaming. When it’s on, you can rest easy knowing Hulu is offering you the smoothest playback at the highest resolution possible for your bandwidth.

Ad Volume Normalization
Another feature that will improve the viewing experience on Hulu is one you can’t see, but will hear, instead: ad volume normalization. There’s a widespread myth that broadcasters and even Hulu would boost commercial audio levels, but it’s just that, a myth. In the past, we tried to normalize ad volume to content volume globally, but that wasn’t a perfect fix because content comes to Hulu with differing audio levels, and you can only raise the audio levels so much before you’re simply magnifying background noise. In particular, many masters for older titles have really low audio levels, and producing new masters is often impossible or prohibitively expensive.

Our new ad volume normalization feature handles volume adjustments on the fly. As our player approaches an ad break, it begins analyzing the audio level of the content. When the ad is called, the player compares the content’s most recent audio levels with a precomputed audio value for the ad and brings them into line dynamically.

Closed Captioning Display
For closed captions, we’ve added two new display options in addition to our original white text display, so now you can also choose yellow text, or white text on a solid black background. Each of the new options should improve the visibility of captions for most scenarios.

Seek Preview
When you hover your mouse cursor on our new player timeline, we now display a preview thumbnail of that spot in the video. This should vastly improve the accuracy of seeking around in a video. Since seeking past an ad break can trigger an advertisement before the video resumes playing, we wanted to do as much as possible to ensure our users get to the exact moment they’re searching for on the first try.

Heat Map
If you don’t have an exact moment in mind but are curious to discover particular moments of interest within a full episode or full-length movie, we’ve now ported the heat map from our captions tab to the drop-down pane below the player. Captions and the heat map never had any intrinsic relationship, and this move allows us to display the heat map on all long-form videos, even those without captions.

The width of the heat map aligns to the width of the new timeline exactly. The heights of the bars in the heat map indicate the relative popularity of various sections of that video. Hover over any bar and the corresponding preview thumbnail will appear above the video timeline. Click on any bar to jump to that place in the video. The heat map in conjunction with the visual timeline adds another powerful tool to the viewer’s seek toolbox.

A Bigger, Sleeker Player
That’s a look under the hood of the new player. We’ve also refreshed the design. For starters, we wanted to increase the size of our base in-browser player. We no longer scale the 480p video down. At its native resolution of 720 x 404px, our new video player is 25 percent larger in viewing area than our previous player.

The default view of the player is now chromeless, meaning it’s clear of any controls, which gives it a cleaner look. The old Hulu player had a timeline visible at all times, but the new player displays the timeline only on mouseover and keeps the timeline height and width fixed.

The fullscreen button has shifted to the lower right of the player. The new location is also consistent across all the different incarnations of our player: regular, fullscreen, pop-out, embed, and off-Hulu (i.e. on our distribution partner sites like Yahoo). Many web video players have the fullscreen button there, and this control is used frequently enough that adhering to this unofficial standard location seemed prudent.

We’ve also renamed continuous play “autoplay” and have shifted the controls into the player itself. Previously those controls sat outside the player in a continuous play bar, but this feature generates enough usage to have earned a permanent integration into our player controls. At the same time, we’ve reduced the autoplay control footprint by replacing the “next video” button with the more universal icon for skip and by moving the autoplay playlist selector into a pop-over menu.

In the old player, we had a left and right column outside the player that held additional controls like pop-out or embed. These have all moved to the right of the player now. Since the player itself is bigger, menus for options like embedding or sharing videos have grown in size also. Rather than add more options with the additional real estate, we’ve left the controls largely the same as it lends a more airy, spacious feel.

You can still customize the start and end points of the video you share, as well as select a custom thumbnail for any video you wish to embed. With the increased timeline width in those menus, it’s easier to do so with precision. The one new option is the ability to select between two sizes of video player to embed.

We made a few other subtle design updates. When you pause a video, the buffer indicator is now at the top, and we now display the current video resolution to its left. In pause mode we used to display a large play icon in the center of the video player as a cue. We’ve shrunk that button, and after a few seconds of inactivity, it now fades out completely and only returns on mouseover. Lastly, our new player will shrink the video window down when it encounters end credits, devoting more player real estate to suggest other videos to watch. We can tell from view-through data that most users aren’t interested in the end credits. But if you are, you can still restore full-size view with one click. We won’t shrink end credits if the show inserts additional content after the end credits.

An Aside on HTML5
Those are the highlights of our new player. Before we move on to the other updates to our site today, let me address a related topic that’s been in the news a lot recently: HTML5. Plenty of users and members of the press ask about this topic all the time.

When it comes to technology, our only guiding principle is to best serve the needs of all of our key customers: our viewers, our content partners who license programs to us, our advertisers, and each other. We continue to monitor developments on HTML5, but as of now it doesn’t yet meet all of our customers’ needs. Our player doesn’t just simply stream video, it must also secure the content, handle reporting for our advertisers, render the video using a high performance codec to ensure premium visual quality, communicate back with the server to determine how long to buffer and what bitrate to stream, and dozens of other things that aren’t necessarily visible to the end user. Not all video sites have these needs, but for our business these are all important and often contractual requirements.

That’s not to say these features won’t be added to HTML5 in the future (or be easier to implement). Technology is a fast-moving space and we’re constantly evaluating which tools will best allow us to fulfill our mission for as many of our customers as possible.

That’s a look at the new Hulu player. Let’s turn to advertising.

Introducing Ad Tailor
The launch of the new Hulu player today also enables us to release a new ad personalization feature which we call Ad Tailor. The goal of Ad Tailor is to increase the relevance of ads for our viewers.

Ad Tailor works in two ways. One is that we now offer the user the option to give us immediate feedback on every video ad’s relevance. In the upper right of every video ad, we ask “Is this ad relevant to you?” and offer a yes and a no button. These buttons replace our old “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” buttons on ads. The new wording is deliberate since the thumbs up and down iconology might suggest that we were interested primarily in your subjective opinion of the ad creative when what’s more critical for us is understanding whether the product or service being shown is relevant to you. We can’t alter our advertisers’ creative, but we can control which ads we show you. We’ll use your feedback to adjust which ads we show you in the future.

Ad Tailor tries to improve ad relevance in another way. Occasionally, when you’re watching a video, we’ll also serve up a single or multi-question survey in place of an advertisement. Answer any single question and we’ll return you to your video immediately, and answer any multiple question survey and we’ll reward you with some ad-free viewing. Answering these questions is always optional, and any responses given will be kept confidential.

The more efficiently we can match ads up with users, the more everyone benefits. Users see more relevant ads, and advertisers reach a more targeted and receptive audience.

When we use Ad Tailor to personalize an ad we show you, you’ll see a brief visual cue at the start of the ad: in the upper right corner we’ll display “This ad brought to you by Ad Tailor.” The more feedback you provide, the more we’ll be able to personalize the selection of ads we show you.

More Customization
The last update to our site today is a refresh of our three homepages: the main Hulu homepage, the TV homepage, and the Movies homepage.

One of the primary goals of the homepage refreshes was to add a new layer of personalization. If you’re signed in to Hulu, we’ll recommend shows just for you in the masthead at the top of the page. You can now change what we display in the left two columns of all three homepages through the dropdown header, and we’ll retain your preferences from session to session. We’ve added a My Videos section to each homepage that allows signed-in Hulu users to look at their queue, subscriptions and viewing history without leaving the homepage. At the bottom of all three homepages, just above the footer, we’ve added a recommendations carousel. If you’re signed in, we’ll recommend shows based on your past viewing, but if you’re not logged in, we’ll pull from a long list of our favorite shows and movies from our catalog.

Other changes to the layout of the homepage balance what we’ve learned from user behavior on the site and what we’re interested in helping users discover in the months to come. Like many sites, we’re constantly striking a balance between surfacing what users already like and what they don’t know they will like. With our catalog having grown to hundreds of content partners and thousands of titles, the most efficient way to do that is evolving.

Here in Los Angeles, where the weather seems to be sunny every day, it’s easy to lose track of what season it is. But we like to think of this as a spring refresh. As always, your feedback is welcome.

Happy viewing,
Eugene Wei (eugene.wei@hulu.com)
VP of Product, Hulu

Update: We have started a discussions thread for updates from our support team here.

Update: We’re back up and running. Thanks for sticking around.

We’re currently experiencing some network problems here at Hulu, so many of you are currently unable to access videos. We’re working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible so you can catch up on your Thursday night shows and watch the latest developments in the late night talk show wars. Thanks for your patience!

Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor

Like many of you, we’ve been following the events in Haiti. On Hulu, we’re currently running several PSAs featuring organizations sending aid to Haiti. Here’s a list of links to those organizations (this list will expand as more PSAs are delivered to us soon).

American Red Cross
Charity Water
Mercy Corps
Real Medicine Foundation

A longer list of charities providing aid to Haiti can be found here.

Thank you,
Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper)
Editor

As we wrap up the year here at Hulu HQ, I’d like to send – on behalf of the whole Hulu team – a very big thank you to our customers. It is our customers that make Hulu possible and it is our customers that have enabled this service to thrive in 2009.

As a business, we were extremely fortunate in 2009. Some highlights:

- Monthly users of Hulu, as measured by comScore, grew to over 43 million, a 95 percent increase over this time last year.

- Monthly streams, as measured by comScore, grew to 924 million, a 307 percent increase from this time last year.

- Hulu’s content library doubled over the past year. We now offer over 14,000 hours of premium content, up from 5,600 hours at this time last year.

- We grew from 130 content partners last year to over 200 today, which includes the addition of Disney/ABC content.

- The number of advertisers/marketers we have served has more than doubled, growing from 166 to 408. As a team, we are extremely excited about the atypically strong results we have been able to drive for our marketing partners.

- 6.4 million Hulu video players were embedded across the web in 2009, a 237 percent jump from 2008 levels. To date, Hulu players have been embedded on over 207,000 websites.

- Some of the more prominent consumer-facing innovations from 2009: Hulu Desktop, Captions Search, Continuous Play, Tags, and the ongoing innovation hub that is Hulu Labs.

- Our search service managed nearly 1 billion search queries in 2009, up 175 percent from 2008.

- The five most popular shows on the service in 2009:

• Saturday Night Live
• Family Guy
• The Office
• The Simpsons
• Naruto Shippuden

- Hulu’s most embedded video of 2009 was the live stream of Barack Obama’s inauguration.

- The most popular clip on Hulu in 2009 was “Motherlover“, a Saturday Night Live Digital Short.

- The most popular full episode on Hulu in 2009 was Family Guy’s “Stew-Roids.”

- Our customers had a lot to say about us in 2009, and we listened carefully. Some of the more colorful comments (via Twitter):

• BradMays: If Hulu.com truly is an evil alien plot to take over the world…I’ve already been assimilated.
• andrewjmay: Dear Hulu, This has been on my mind for a while now, but tonight is the night that I let you know my true feelings….I love you.
• kiki_miserychic: I’m getting a coffee from McCafe tomorrow because Hulu told me to do it. My brain is liquidy slush.
• Tiffanyasapun: found Hulu.com and my feet hurt. Those 2 are unrelated.

- Hulu was fortunate to receive a number of awards over the last year, including being named the World’s 3rd Most Innovative Company (Fast Company, March 2009), being included in TIME magazine’s Top 50 Best Websites, and ranking among the Top 5 fastest rising Google search terms.

We recognize that what we are aspiring to do is extremely ambitious and filled with considerable risk. But that has always been the nature of this pioneering journey. We have incredible conviction both in our product vision and in our customer obsession. We believe that customers deserve to have a service that enables them to find and enjoy the world’s premium content … when, where, and how they want it. We are resolute in this mission and are here to make it a reality.

On behalf of the Hulu team, thank you for joining us in the adventure that was 2009 and we look forward to even greater heights in 2010.

Jason Kilar (jason@hulu.com)
CEO, Hulu

P.S. Some “behind the scenes” moments at Hulu in 2009:

Our head of distribution, Pete Distad, walked into his office earlier this year to find that it had been aluminum-foiled.

Some of Hulu’s hard-working, kick-butt developers taking some time off near the Beijing Development Center.

Hulu has a come as you are dress code … even if that means you are a garden gnome or Manny Ramirez.

The Hulu team hanging out by the pool on the set of the upcoming If I Can Dream television show.

Summer 2009: our first annual Hulu team golf tournament. Given that we are all horrendous at golf, we decided to instead keep score based on style.

We tend to get passionate about our marketing partners’ businesses. Here is some of the team product testing a new Taco Bell product.

The Hulu crew catching a 3D commercial during the Super Bowl … minutes before Hulu’s evil plot to destroy the world was publicly revealed.

Catching an 18-minute sneak preview of Avatar months ahead of the film’s theatrical release.

Today we’ve added a new beta feature to the site in Hulu Labs: Captions Search. You can now search the captions for thousands of videos across hundreds of shows.

You can initiate a captions search from the Hulu Labs page for the feature, but the more permanent home for captions search is in the new Captions tab on any show or video page for any program with captions.

Recently I watched an episode of House, and they made a funny joke about the resemblance between Dr. Foreman (Omar Epps) and Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin. I couldn’t remember which episode it was in, let alone which moment of within the episode.

With the new caption search, I just type in “mike tomlin”, and voila.

If you just want a quick preview of the search result, hover your mouse cursor over the image and a short segment of video around the search term will play in the thumbnail. To see it at full size, click on the search result text and we’ll send you to that spot in the full-size video. (House knows about football? He truly is a man for all seasons.)

One bonus that comes with caption search is what we’re calling the heat map. This is a visual graph of the user interest throughout the span of a video and is available on any captioned video that has accumulated enough user views. It appears at the top of the captions tab for those videos. We analyze a variety of viewer behaviors to generate the heat map.

The first use for the heat map is as a navigation tool: You can click on any bar in the graph to jump to that section of captions. If you search the captions for a video, we’ll highlight bars in blue in the heat map to indicate where the matching results appear in the video.

But a second use is to find particularly popular segments within that video. For many videos, interest is fairly linear across a program, but for some shows, the pattern reveals intriguing spikes.

For example, here’s the heat map for one episode of a popular show on our site.

You’ll notice a peak about three-fourths of the way through the video. This is the ninth episode of Glee, titled “Wheels,” and that mesa in the graph represents one of the musical numbers for which the show has become so beloved, in this case a performance of “Defying Gravity.”

In fact, in almost every episode of Glee you’ll find these peaks in the heat map corresponding to the musical numbers. In the episode “Mattress,” the peak about halfway through is for the kids’ performance of Van Halen’s “Jump” (with a smaller but visible crest just a few minutes earlier for a cover of Lily Allen’s “Smile”).

Lest you think Glee is the only show capitalizing on this music craze, check out this episode of The Colbert Report. What is that Everest of viewer interest at the end of the episode? Let’s just say we’re convinced now, there’s nothing Colbert can’t do.

In the Pilot of V, what is the spike about eight minutes into the episode? Hint: hello, Morena Baccarin!

As this feature is still in beta, we’re curious to see how you use it and what you’d like to see from it. Your feedback, as always, is welcome at feedback@hulu.com.

Happy holidays!

Eugene Wei (eugene.wei@hulu.com)
VP, Product

Today, as part of Hulu for the Holidays, we’ve added a new default view for your queue, one that groups all the videos within it by show. Before, you could sort everything in your queue by show by clicking on the Title and Information column header, but it wasn’t always clear that was how you’d do it. As we’ve added more content and as users’ queues have grown in size, grouping by show as a default was a logical update. Visit your queue today to experience the new queue layout firsthand.

Within this new layout we offer two display options. One is a vertical text list of videos within each show, a layout that may be familiar to those of you who use DVRs.

The other is a more visual layout with thumbnails laid out in horizontal carousels, more of an echo of the carousels on our show pages.

In either view, click on the “Play All” link above the videos to play from the oldest to the most recently aired videos for that show. As before, clicking on any video within a show in your queue will activate Autoplay, but in this new “group by show” view, we’ll only play through all the videos from that particular show.

Want to try out the new queue but don’t have many videos in there? We’ve made it easier to add entire seasons of episodes from a show to your queue. Visit a show page, and at the top of the list of episodes for that show, we’ve added a “+ all” link. There will be one “+ all” link per season of that show. Click it and all the episodes from that season will drop into your queue at once.

If you like to create your own ordering of videos in the queue, one that cuts across multiple shows, you can still access the old list view of the queue. Just click on “List View” at the top of your queue, next to the “Group by Show” link, and you’ll access the older, single list layout for the queue.

We hope you find this useful both this holiday season and in the future. As always, your feedback is welcome.

Cheers,
Eugene Wei (eugene.wei@hulu.com)
VP of Product

Hulu for the Holidays continues with an action title to keep you entertained as the Christmas season ramps up. Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita is now available through the end of the year. It’s the film that inspired the TV series (and myriad other spy shows and movies, for that matter): a petty criminal — that’d be Nikita — is groomed to be a professional killer and, as she becomes a hardened assassin, she’s torn between her alliance to the agency and the desire to lead a normal life.

Like every other Monday, we’re also highlighting a new site feature. Today’s update targets bloggers and website editors, anyone who embeds videos from Hulu.com on their own website. Now you can select the image that appears in the embedded Hulu player before your readers start the video. For instance, the default thumbnail image for this week’s SNL Monologue features host Blake Lively (Gossip Girl) standing next to the Swedish Chef from the Muppets (played by Andy Samberg).

If you’re writing a blog entry about the clip, though, and don’t want to give away the sketch’s punchline, now you can select your own thumbnail image. As before, to embed a video, select “Embed” from the menu on the left side of the video while it’s playing. Your video will pause and the embed tool will appear, allowing you to grab the embed code (with the default image) or create a custom clip by sliding the handles at the bottom of the progress bar to the appropriate times in the video. To select your own thumbnail image, simply move the “Thumbnail” slider across the progress bar until you reach the desired screenshot. Below, for example, I’ve moved the thumbnail tool closer to the start of the video.

As you slide the thumbnail selector over, the embed code updates automatically. When you’ve found the perfect image, just click on “copy to clipboard” and paste the code to your blog publisher, like I’ve done here:

Let us know what you think about the custom thumbnails for embedded videos feature by sending any suggestions or comments to feedback@hulu.com. And don’t forget to visit our Hulu for the Holidays page for the latest updates.

Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor

Later this evening, President Obama will talk to the nation about his strategy for Afghanistan via a live television broadcast that will also stream in real time on Hulu from 8 p.m. EST/5 p.m. PST courtesy of our partners at Fox News. An on-demand version of the Presidential Address will be posted later Wednesday.

The live stream, expected to last about an hour, will be accessible internationally. To share the coverage from your own website or blog, you can grab the embed code for the live stream from the countdown embedded below and paste it onto your site. [Update: we've posted the on-demand version below.]

For more political coverage, MSNBC provides a handful of clips related to the Obama administration every day. In the clip embedded below, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs offers a preview of the upcoming press conference.

Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor

Behind the scenes here at Hulu, we’re always making little adjustments to make the site better for our users. A lot of these tweaks come about based on our own use of the site, but we also implement a lot of the suggestions submitted to us by our users. Lately, we’ve been focusing on our search tools — after all, we want Hulu to be a better place to not only watch videos, but also to find them, too.

With this mission in mind, we improved our search capabilities with a new feature called Advanced Search, which we’ve unveiled today as part of Hulu for the Holidays. Advanced search offers an easy-to-use interface that allows you to find the exact video you’re looking for — look for it on any search results page, or follow the link near the bottom of the Hulu.com homepage. You can search by a keyword or phrase (use quotes to set off a phrase), search within specific fields (such as Show Title, Video Title, Description and more), and use common search operators — “and,” “or” and “not” — to narrow your results.

The Advanced Search menu also offers a way to limit your results to videos with closed captioning — just click on the appropriate check box. In addition, a family-friendly search option offers an easy way to search for content that might be more appropriate for younger viewers. (The filter will exclude videos that are rated TV-14, PG-13, TV-MA, R, NC-17, NSFW or NR.)

If you search for videos on Hulu often, we offer search operators that correspond with each of the fields in our Advanced Search menu, so you can type in a complete search query directly from the search bar. For instance, you can use the plus sign (“+”) to add keywords to your search string. For example, +jim +pam +wedding calls up videos related to Jim and Pam’s wedding on The Office earlier this season. (You can learn more about search operators in this blog entry or by checking out our updated Search Tips page.)

As always, we welcome your feedback about search or anything you see on Hulu. You can send suggestions and comments to us at feedback@hulu.com. In the meantime, we have a lot more content and site features lined up for the remainder of Hulu for the Holidays, including today’s film, Vexille. Available in dubbed and subtitled formats, this CG/motion-capture title takes place in 2077 Japan, where a tough-as-nails agent, Vexille, is out to expose the country’s dealings with banned robotic biotechnology.

Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor

Today we’re launching tags across Hulu. Those of you who are heavy users of the web are likely already familiar with the benefits of tags as both a classification system and a discovery tool. With the web sprouting up in random directions so quickly, you could say that a bottoms-up classification system like tags was made for the web (and in large part, it was). It doesn’t depend on any single authority to function, yet from the varied activity of millions of users, an organic, flexible, and useful order emerges.

Our video catalog has grown to a size where tags will prove extremely useful. Tagging on Hulu is quick and easy. On each video or show page on our site, you’ll find a list of tags near the bottom of the main page or in the Tags tab to the right of the Discussions tab. Simply check the box next to any tags you think are appropriate to that video or show, or use the Add Tags entry box to add your own.

Click on any tag or enter a term such as “comedy” in the “Search with tags” box to discover other videos with that tag on Hulu. Narrow your search results by adding related tags — for instance, add “satire” to your comedy tag search to find videos tagged both “comedy and satire“.

Click on Your Tags to see all videos that you’ve tagged. Filter the list of all your tagged videos by selecting one or more of your tags listed in the left column. Using this feature you can create custom collections of videos.

One last note: while the beauty of tags is that there are no rules, we do have a preference for separating first and last names with a space, like “tina fey” instead of “tinafey”. That has to do with how we see people searching for names, though again, it’s not a requirement. We’ll also filter out any profanity and normalize your tags to lower case.

That’s it. Tag away! And do send any feedback our way — we’d love to hear from you.

Varun Narang (varun@hulu.com)
Product Manager

Do you know the person that absolutely nails this role description?

If so, we’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for sending information my way (jason.kilar@hulu.com) and we’ll handle the rest.

Jason Kilar (jason.kilar@hulu.com)
CEO, Hulu

Here at Hulu, we prioritize our features based largely on the feedback we receive from our users, and some of your most common questions are related to our streaming schedule for shows that are currently airing on TV. Simply put, we’ve noticed that many of you are often wondering when new episodes will be available. After a lot of work with our content providers, our product and design team, and our content team, we decided to create a page that contains a schedule of what’s to come for the week ahead.

You can find this page, which we’re calling “Coming Soon,” when you follow the “Browse by Date” link at the top of Hulu.com and then click on the “Coming Soon” tab. The schedule will consist of scripted currents from ABC, NBC and FOX, including such as favorites as Family Guy, FlashForward, The Cleveland Show, The Office, Bones, Fringe, Modern Family and more. We are hoping to add additional series to the list over time so you can keep up with your favorites.

Along with the schedule, there are a few new features that will help you manage your Hulu viewing. If you’re a registered user, you can request an email notification to alert you when a particular video has been added to Hulu.com. We’ll also alert you on the rare occasion when that video is late in getting up on Hulu.com. For bloggers and editors, you can also grab the code to pre-embed the video to your blog. (An example is pasted below.) We will swap in the video as soon as it’s available on our site, so you’re free to post your article on your own schedule.

Again, thanks for sending us all of your feedback about the site, and we encourage you to send your comments about Coming Soon to feedback@hulu.com. We hope you find this feature helpful — I know it’s definitely something I’m going to use.

Cheers,
Betina Chan-Martin (betina@hulu.com)
User Feedback Evangelist

Have you visited Hulu Labs lately? It’s a section of Hulu.com devoted to new products and features that are still in beta, so you can share your ideas on how to make these services more useful to you. It’s home to Hulu Desktop (which offers a lean-back viewing experience from your PC), Recommendations, Time-Based Browsing and our Video Panel Designer (a tool that helps you embed multiple Hulu videos to your website), but today we’ve added two new items for you to check out: Hulu Desktop for Linux and Hulu Publisher Tools.

Hulu Desktop for Linux
Since launching Hulu Desktop, we’ve read thousands of comments about the product. Among all the suggestions, there was one that far outnumbered all the others: our users wanted Linux support.

So while we were tweaking the user interface, adding a few keyboard shortcuts and fixing bugs on Hulu Desktop, we were also working on Linux support. Part of our commitment to help everyone enjoy content, after all, is to provide support to all three major computer operating systems. Hulu Desktop for Linux is compatible with both Ubuntu and Fedora distributions, and will support input from hundreds of infrared remote controls. (See the FAQ for more details.)

If you’re a Linux user and want to check out Hulu Desktop for Linux, you can get started here. Since this product is still in Beta, we encourage your feedback. Jump on our discussion boards to share your ideas, make requests and report any bugs to the Hulu Desktop team.

Hulu Publisher Tools
Designed for bloggers, site editors and webmasters, Hulu Publisher Tools makes it easy to browse and discover premium videos — from Hulu and other sites — to embed in articles and blog posts. In addition to content featured by the Hulu team, our publishing tool features a comprehensive directory that offers the opportunity to preview videos and copy embed codes from a single page. Editors can also create custom playlists for Video Panels that can embed multiple Hulu videos in a single unit.

A search bar lets you type in any keyword — “obama,” for instance — and we’ll call up all the relevant videos pulled by our web crawler. You can select a few clips that look good to you, preview them if you like, and copy the embed codes. And if all the content is from Hulu, you can put together a Video Panel in seconds and embed it on your blog, like I’ve done below with some recent clips from Modern Family.

Go to our Labs section to get started with Hulu Publisher Tools, and we always welcome your feedback via the discussion boards or by email feedback@hulu.com.

Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor

When I was growing up, watching TV was largely a sporadic, if regular, event. Each week, an episode of the shows we followed would air, and the family would gather around the TV to watch. Even after VCRs came to market, the capacity of VHS tapes and the slow, somewhat imprecise nature of fast forwarding and rewinding the tapes meant that binge viewing of TV shows wasn’t ideal.

Even in that time, the demand for marathon sessions of viewing existed. It just wasn’t easy. Sometime in the second season of The X-Files, I caught an episode on TV, loved it, and wondered how I could catch up on all the episodes I’d missed. The show hadn’t been syndicated and DVDs hadn’t been invented yet.

The Internet had, though, and so I went onto an X-Files newsgroup, explained my situation, and offered to pay to ship a whole series of blank VHS tapes to any fan willing to dub the first season and mail the tapes back to me. To my surprise, someone accepted, and a few weeks later, a huge box arrived in the mail. I spent an entire weekend locked in my room, curtains drawn, watching some 30 episodes of The X-Files back to back.

Soon after, DVDs and then DVRs hit the market, and, perhaps not coincidentally, studios started to issue TV series with long, serial plotlines that required that you to start from the beginning and keep up with multiple story threads, all intertwined. A TV series like 24 or Lost, with its complex plotlines, is more difficult to imagine in the age before DVD box sets, DVR subscriptions and Internet episode guides.

This trip through days of TV viewing past is a long way of introducing Continuous Play, a new feature we’ve added to Hulu today. Even in the on-demand world of online viewing, we see plenty of binge viewing as people work their way through multiple episodes in a session. Continuous Play makes this easier.

Though it’s a new feature, it’s built off some logic that already exists on our site. As you play a video from your queue, for example, we will pause for a moment when the video reaches its endpoint, and then move on to play the next video in your queue, automatically. Continuous Play expands this logic outside of the queue.

Now on every video player on our site, you’ll see a new Continuous Play bar under the video player. On the far right is a dropdown that shows what playlist of videos Continuous Play is working from. For now, there are three primary types of playlists. One is Your Queue, mentioned earlier. The next class is Collections, which have always been part of our site, but which now play continuously. The last type of playlist is more of whichever title you’re watching. If you’re watching a bit from Saturday Night Live, the playlist will be “Saturday Night Live” and will play more sketches from SNL in sequential order. If you’re watching an episode of 30 Rock, Continuous Play will play more episodes of 30 Rock in sequential order.

Just to the left of the dropdown is the On/Off switch for Continuous Play which does just what is says it does. If you click on a video from Your Queue, Continuous Play will turn on, and your queue will play one video after another, just as it always has. Select a group of videos from our Collections page, and Continuous Play will also turn on. Anywhere else on the site, we’ve left Continuous Play off by default. If you visit Hulu from the same computer, we’ll retain the on/off state of Continuous Play from one session to the next.

On the far left of our video panel, you’ll find the “next video” button. Clicking it will send you to the next video in the playlist. Hovering over the “next video” button will show the title of the next video to the right of the button, but if you want a visual view of the next videos in the playlist, click the “show playlist” button below the dropdown and a carousel will drop down, allowing you to browse the playlist and jump ahead to another video if you’d like.

Continuous Play controls carry over to full screen and pop-out modes as well. Give it a try and let us know what you think. If you’re looking for a suggestion as to where to start, try Lost. We have the first four seasons. Start with the Pilot episode, turn on continuous play, and some 84 episodes and roughly 62 hours later, you’ll have a good idea of how Continuous Play works (though you may have a lot of questions about smoke monsters, time travel and the nature of fate).

Eugene Wei
VP of Product
eugene.wei@hulu.com

P.S.: The title of my blog post is a reference to the novel by David Foster Wallace, which I finished recently as part of the recent Infinite Summer book group. In the book, Wallace writes about a film so entertaining that viewers lose all desire to do anything except watch the film again and again. I can’t help but think of that fictional film whenever I hear of someone who stayed up all night watching an entire season of a TV show.