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Print 7 comment(s) - last by meepstone.. on Mar 14 at 7:46 PM
Hulu has been around for one year, and promises another year of growth

Video viewing site Hulu.com has been online for more than one year and is now officially rolling out new social networking features on the site.

The new social networking features were designed by Hulu to have users share movie and TV episode recommendations among one another.  Hulu hopes, assuming the strategy works, could help raise ad revenue to the site, despite the turbulent state of the economy.

Hulu users are now able to utilize the "Hulu Friends" feature that has been integrated into the site.  Similar to other social networking sites, Hulu users sign in and can add friends based on Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo Mail, Gmail and other services.  If they accept, users can monitor a friend's activity and see what they're posting and watching.

It's possible to disable activity-feed features for users who don't want their friends to be able to monitor what they're seeing.

The on-demand video site is a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp., and has been extremely popular since its public launch.  Hulu is now in second place only behind YouTube among video sites and their total streams.  Nielsenn Online VideoCensus indicates Hulu streamed almost 309 million videos last month, which is up 32 percent compared to the month prior.

To celebrate its one-year anniversary, Hulu plans to introduce a "bevy of new shows, more seasons of user favorites, and classic cartoons and movies," the site promises.

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Don't Think
By MrPerez on 3/13/2009 11:34:43 AM , Rating: 3
This will work to their advantage, they are just too many social networking websites around. So letting friends know what they are watching or recommend something to friends is as easy as a twitter post.

I honestly hate when people with my email address use services like this and i get daily emails asking me to sign up, its annoying.




RE: Don't Think
By Mojo the Monkey on 3/13/2009 12:48:40 PM , Rating: 3
Really? Sounds like yet another "me too" idea for a site/business that has no real reason to have social networking. I'm reminded of the episode of the office where Ryan was promoted to corporate exec and kept trying to push the "social networking" for the paper company website. Haha.


News Corp...I don't get it
By MADAOO7 on 3/14/2009 3:29:08 AM , Rating: 3
I don't understand how Newscorp can make such a well-designed, user friendly site such as Hulu when their Myspace site is such a clusterf*** of ads and year-old facebook ideas.




Meh
By Suntan on 3/13/2009 12:57:25 PM , Rating: 2
9 times out of 10 the movies and shows that friends and relatives say they like are the ones I then plan to avoid because I know they have horrible taste for the subject matter.

Seriously, what do I care to know every show my mom or sister or friend or inlaws watch? if they thought I would like it, i'm guessing they will actually suggest that I watch it. You know, real social-communication-style instead of fake-internet-society-style.

How about striving to maintain the most streamlined pages with just the pertinent information about the shows so I can decide for my own self if I want to watch it instead of popping up annoying tags that tell me "people in my neighborhood like to watch it" and other such nonsense.

-Suntan




By etherreal on 3/13/2009 1:09:46 PM , Rating: 2
Social networking might be nice...but I won't care until I can stream every episode of Star Trek (TOS,TNG,DS9) at my whimsy. First service that does that will have me as an instant subscriber (c'mon, Roku.....)




Common Consumer View
By techone on 3/13/2009 2:08:33 PM , Rating: 2
I'm with most people that like to keep sites clean of clutter. I dumped Netflix as I paying 9 bucks a month to stream movies and get 1 movie a month(just didn't watch much on disk) for Hulu.com and Surfthechannel.com to watch a good majority of content.

Hulu.com may not have ALL the content but it's really unrealistic to think that 1 site is going to have all content given the aggreements/contracts/syndications that plagued OTA and Cable and Satellite. Since Hulu.com is driven by the Ad Council which actually don't show worthless commercials everytime I don't mind the 30 seconds pause 3 times during my episode.

I don't mind surfing around to different sites for different content, as long as the content is not poorly rendered.

From my standpoint if your willing to look around you can find most of the shows that are on for free after a little waiting. Some shows are posted 1 day - 1 week afterwards. I've recently cut my cable tv to save costs for real things such as a vacation!




in my opinion
By meepstone on 3/14/2009 7:46:21 PM , Rating: 2
What would really help the site is to have movies that are good. Only movie on the site i remember was worth watching was air force one and joe kidd.




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