We’ve just introduced some changes that make sifting through the Criterion Collection on Hulu Plus a lot less daunting. Some brand new features will help you discover new films to love as we continue to additional titles from Criterion — more than 100 since launching the section in February, nearly all of which stream exclusively on Hulu Plus, with many others to come in coming weeks.

Since Criterion has compiled so many great works by the world’s greatest filmmakers, we’ve added new functionality that allows you to sort by director. So now you can devote an entire weekend to watching 10 Charlie Chaplin films from just one page.

Movies are now sorted into themes, too. Want to see Francois Truffaut’s first film? It’s “400 Blows,” and you can find that out under the First Films section in Themes. We’ve grouped together titles into categories such as Oscar winners, documentaries, and titles from independent American filmmakers.

Additionally, we’ve begun adding supplemental videos from the Criterion Collection on Hulu Plus. You can find these as you watch a film, and they include some fantastic highlights, including:

• - An interview with George Lucas on Akira Kurosawa for “The Hidden Fortress,” a key influence on “Star Wars Episode IV”
• - Martin Scorsese discussing “La Strada”
• - An introduction to “The Virgin Spring” by Ang Lee
• - A behind-the-scenes look at “The Making of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters”

We’ll continue to roll out supplements as quickly as we can digitize them.

We think these updates will enhance your experience as you enjoy the Criterion Collection on Hulu Plus. Let us know what you think!

While all that was going down, the Hulu team was hard at work implementing some new features to the http://www.hulu.com home page. While we’re still working on our GeoCities fan page, we just implemented a new visitor counter and, even cooler, a guest book for you to leave your comments. As always, these features are best seen on Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer with your resolution set at 1024×768.

Check it out and let us know what you think!

© 1996 Hulu, LLC

• – Improved playback reporting to help our team improve the playback experience.
• – UI tweaks to compensate for device overscan.
• – Additional improvements and bug fixes.

The Roku team is also in the process of releasing a firmware update (their announcement here) that will resolve a playback issue observed by users who leave the player paused for several minutes or users with very fast network connections.

Let us know what you think!

Daniel Bear
Senior Development Lead, Hulu

As part of the agreement, a selection of great current programming from MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, TV Land, BET and other Viacom channel brands will also be added to Hulu Plus. Each episode of leading shows like Jersey Shore, Teen Mom 2, and Tosh.0 will be available starting 21 days after their on-air premiere, and all episodes will remain on the service through the end of their respective season. Welcome to Hulu Plus, Snooki.

In the coming weeks on Hulu Plus, we also will be adding more than 2,000 episodes of shows from Viacom’s library including Chappelle’s Show,The Hills, Reno 911, and many more.

While the new content above is news on its own, I thought it would be appropriate to use this opportunity to also share the Hulu team’s point of view on the future of TV. For those interested, read on. For those not interested, may we suggest the latest episode of The Daily Show?

Jason Kilar
CEO Hulu
jason@hulu.com

The Hulu team is often asked about our thoughts on the future of TV. The following represents our point of view, which has been materially influenced by our daily interactions with users, advertisers, and content owners. We are fortunate to have such meaningful interactions with these three customer sets, and we are relentlessly inventing better ways to serve them.

The future of TV.

Distributors will certainly play a role in the future of TV, but we believe that three potent forces will be far more powerful in shaping that future: consumers, advertisers and content owners.

Consumers have spoken emphatically as to what they want and what they do not want in their future television experience. What we’ve heard:

* Traditional TV has too many ads. Users have demonstrated that they will go to great lengths to avoid the advertising load that traditional TV places upon them. Setting aside sports and other live event programming, consumers are increasingly moving to on-demand viewing, in part because of the lighter ad load (achieved via ad-skipping DVRs, traditional video on demand systems, and/or online viewing).
* Consumers want TV to be more convenient for them. People want programs to start at a time that is convenient for their schedules, not at a time dictated to them. Consumption of original TV episodes will eventually mirror theatrical movie attendance: big opening Friday nights, but more consumption will be in the days and weeks afterward. Consumers also want the freedom to be able to watch TV on whatever screen is most convenient for them, be it a smartphone, a tablet, a PC, or, yes, a TV.
* Consumers are demonstrating that they are the greatest marketing force a good television show or movie could ever have, given the powerful social media tools at consumers’ disposal. Consumers now also have the power to immediately tank a bad series, given how fast and broad consumer sentiment is disseminated. This is nothing short of a game-changer for content creators, owners, and distributors.

The above trends are a reality and we believe the wise move is to find ways to exploit these new trends and leverage them to build great businesses. History has shown that incumbents tend to fight trends that challenge established ways and, in the process, lose focus on what matters most: customers. Hulu is not burdened by that legacy.

Advertisers have weighed in heavily on the future of TV, with both their thoughts and their considerable wallets. Advertisers are increasingly expecting to present their advertising messages to just their desired audience…and not to anyone else. For over 60 years, video advertising could only be bought via a TV show’s projected audience, which served as a blunt proxy for a certain target audience. The result has been many wasted impressions and an often irrelevant experience for consumers. In the near future, advertisers will demand the ability to target their messages to people rather than targeting their messages to TV shows as proxies for people.

Content owners, the third factor in the future of TV, have been very clear: they as a group need to make a fair return on their significant investment in creating content. Content owners will license their best content in the best windows to those distributors that pay the most on a per-user per-month basis. Content owners will bundle their content to the degree customers will respond, simply because it is in the content owners’ economic interest to do so. If enough customers refuse to purchase their bundles, then the bundles will either be reduced in price/scope (possible) or dismantled (far less likely). Customers will ultimately make the decisions here.

With the above dynamics in mind, we believe that there is going to be tremendous near-term innovation in the pay TV distribution business. The internet has made it possible for new entrants to innovate quickly and materially. Consumers will have more choice and convenience going forward. This competition will drive prices and margins down in pay TV distribution. A greater percentage of the economic pie will flow back to content owners and creators. As mentioned before, advertisers will be able to target their messages to people, not to TV shows as proxies for people. Going forward, rapid innovation, low margins, and customer obsession will define the winners in pay TV distribution.

The above has influenced the path the Hulu team has taken to date. In 2007, we began the process of building what is now the leading online video advertising service. Based on metrics from Nielsen/IAG, Hulu’s video advertising service is roughly 2x as effective as traditional TV video advertising services. Our point of view since 2007 has been that if we become the most effective video advertising service, then we could earn higher advertising revenues (per hour of content consumed) than anyone else’s ad business. We also have been highly focused on the reality that advertising monetization during a DVR session is headed steadily downhill, which is a looming issue for content owners. And the answer is not adding a full broadcast ad load to the video-on-demand experience (that will just drive DVR viewing – and ad-skipping – further north). Our conviction remains that if we respect the customer and innovate effectively, we can pay content owners more from the ad side of the business than anyone else’s ad service can do (be that live/linear consumption or DVR viewing). The below chart compares how much revenue Hulu currently generates from advertising per half-hour tv episode versus the advertising revenue that traditional distribution generates.

In the near to mid term, we anticipate being able to generate higher advertising returns than any traditional channel can from their advertising service, for any type of content. We’ve invented patentable technology that has enabled us to deliver much more relevant video advertising and to do so in a manner that generates much higher recall and purchase intent than other video advertising services. The market is responding: we expect to approach half a billion in total revenues (advertising and subscription combined) in 2011, up from $263 million in 2010, which was up from $108 million in 2009.

But advertising is only part of the equation. The other part is subscription. We officially launched Hulu Plus on November 17, 2010, 11 weeks ago. Hulu Plus is a dual revenue stream subscription service; one revenue stream from the subscription fee, the other from a modest amount of advertising (half the advertising that you’ll see on traditional TV). Hulu Plus includes full current season access to many of TV’s top programs, on an array of internet connected devices, available anytime in an unlimited fashion, for $7.99/month. Our subscriber count will pass 1 million this year, to our knowledge the fastest start of any online video subscription service. In the fall, we expect Hulu Plus as a business will have a revenue run rate north of $200 million. A key element of Hulu Plus is that we are able to compensate content owners more per-user per-month than anyone else for the same body of content. We are able to do this because of the subscription fee, our unusually effective and market-leading advertising service, and our tolerance for thin margins.

The opportunity for content owners.

We believe content owners are in a strong position to make higher returns from TV content distribution in the future than they have historically. If studios and networks license their content to distributors with per-user per-month economics as the model (as opposed to a fixed fee model), then they will be able to extract a higher portion of the total economics their content will generate. We state this given our belief that the majority of the US population (and a material percent of the globe) will be subscribers to some flavor of digital premium content service going forward. We also believe that any number of digital distribution companies have the ability to quickly get to scale; getting to scale is not the hard part about this business. Over the past 4 years, studios and networks have not always insisted on per-user per-month economics in their digital licensing agreements, which has resulted in a regretted under-pricing of their content to digital distributors. That said, we believe that all studios and networks will recognize that it is in their economic interest to insist on per-user per-month pricing in all their distribution relationships (library content and current content). Given the above future, we see strong upside for content owners that are laser-focused on the per-user per-month economics. A greater percentage of the pie should flow to content owners and creators in the future.

Free, ad-supported services.

Given all this talk of dual revenue streams, what becomes of free, ad-supported services like the original Hulu service? We think content owners will pursue one of two paths for each individual piece of content, each for valid reasons:

1. A portion of content will leverage free, ad-supported services aggressively, given a digital service like Hulu provides unusually high ad monetization when compared to DVR sessions and even the bulk of live linear ad monetization. For a substantial body of content, we suspect that Hulu’s ad supported free service will provide the best financial return available to those content owners/creators. We expect significant experimentation will continue as it relates to windowing, as we have seen these past 3 years.

2. Another portion of content will only be available to users that either subscribe directly to a digital service or, alternatively, authenticate that they already have a traditional pay TV subscription. Once a user is recognized as a pay TV service subscriber, the user will be able to watch a specified body of content.

Hulu’s responsibility is to deliver the world’s leading dual revenue stream service and to deliver the world’s leading free, ad-supported service. We expect the free Hulu service to be a core part of our business for years to come, and one that will continue to earn enthusiasm from our users. The stronger the returns we can drive in our free, ad-supported service, the more content will show up in that service. The same goes for our Hulu Plus dual revenue stream service. Clearly, content owners will decide which distribution channels are best for them. As we deliver leading services, Hulu will pay content owners and creators more per-user per-month than anyone else. At the same time, we will be able to price our services for consumers lower than anyone else offering the same body of content, given our market-leading ad service and our tolerance for low margins.

The relentless pursuit of better ways.

It is clear to us that — because of the internet and the increased competition/innovation it brings — the future of TV is going to be very good to users, advertisers and content owners/creators. Users will have convenient access to much more content. We also expect to see lower consumer prices, which will be a function of a marked increase in distribution competition. Advertisers will be able to efficiently and effectively target their messages to just their desired audience, thanks to the internet medium. And content owners will have the opportunity to make higher financial returns, which will be a function of disciplined per-user per-month licensing strategies, along with the benefits that come with intensified distribution competition.

Our journey at Hulu involves significant risk. That is the nature of innovation, particularly the business of re-inventing television. A number of you that are reading this might be thinking that we’d have to be crazy to think that our small team can actually re-invent television and compete effectively against a landscape of distribution giants like cable companies, satellite companies, and huge online companies. We are crazy. All entrepreneurs need to be. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it and there would be no naysayers. We are nothing if not a team that believes in the value of convictions, thoughtful stubbornness, and the relentless pursuit of better ways.

Jason Kilar
Hulu CEO
jason@hulu.com

A subscription to Hulu Plus also makes a great gift for birthdays and other occasions. To give a subscription, please visit hulu.com/plus/gifting. To learn more about Hulu Plus for yourself, check out hulu.com/plus.

Gavin Hewitt (gavin@hulu.com)
Group Program Manager, Hulu

The Fox News stream, hosted by Jon Scott, will feature results and reports from Fox News correspondents across the country, as well as a live in-studio panel discussion. Update: This stream kicks off at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT and runs for approximately three hours.

In addition, at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT, ABC News Now’s John Berman and Claire Shipman will kick off a night of election night coverage, including the latest results and analysis. As polls close, ABC’s David Muir and Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg will have live reaction from the campus community at Arizona State University. This stream is expected to run until

As always, you can grab the embed code for either network’s coverage directly from the Live Streams Lounge, add a reminder to your calendar, or sign up for an alert that will be emailed to you when the stream begins.

Don’t forget to vote!
Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor, Hulu

During the limited preview of Hulu Plus, the application can be downloaded by PlayStation Plus subscribers. Once Hulu Plus becomes generally available, all PS3 users in the United States will be able to download the application.

You can learn more about all the benefits of Hulu Plus here, and request an invite to the limited Preview here. We’re working to rapidly scale the service and will be sending out additional invites over the next several weeks. Happy watching!

Rob Wong (rob.wong@hulu.com)
Director, Product

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

New this year, the Hulu Power Index allows you to see how the ads rank against each other based on our users’ like and dislike votes. The values displayed within the charts are a comparison of “like” (or “dislike”) votes for a particular commercial against the number of “like” or “dislike” votes the most liked/disliked ad received. With a score of 1.0, the Doritos: House Rules commercial is currently the most liked ad, while the score for the Megan Fox Motorola ad is a calculation of its thumbs-up votes vs. the number of positive votes given to the most liked ad (right now, it’s that Doritos commercial).

These values adjust as you apply any of the drop-down filters, which allow you to display results based on gender, age or location. At the time we posted this, for instance, Betty White’s appearance in the Snickers ad really scored big among 35- to 49-year-olds, while the headline-stealing Focus on the Family commercial is neck-and-neck with the Doritos ad among our voters in Florida.

As you can see above, we’ve also integrated a Twitter feed that pulls in the latest Tweets containing an ad’s brand name, so you can see what the rest of the world thinks about that commercial, and list of words appearing most frequently in Tweets about the advertiser allows you to gauge the overall sentiment about the ad, as well.

So tell us: Which ad was your favorite this year? Cast your votes in the AdZone now through Tuesday at 11:59 p.m. EST, and we’ll announce the winner on Wednesday.

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

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