I've said it here before: that on top of the usual bitching and moaning we do online about all the things in our lives that don't work and that make us angry (and I'm as guilty as everyone else), we should also take a moment regularly to publicly celebrate the things in our lives that simply do go right, and do work well, and sometimes even better than they need to be, or better than we expected. One such project in my own life these days, for example, is the remarkably perfect online-video site Hulu, a joint corporate experiment involving such groups as NBC, Fox, PBS, Bravo, Comedy Central, The Sci-Fi Channel, E!, Oxygen, and a whole lot more, not to mention such existing online groups as AOL, MSN and Yahoo. When the project was first announced in spring 2007, like many others I scoffed at the whole thing, seeing it as a poorly-planned "high monetization" response from these places to the lower-revenue option YouTube was trying to "bully" them into accepting (according to them), doomed to disaster just like every other cutting-edge online media experiment by a corporate entity has ever been doomed to disaster.

But here's the big surprise -- that these groups have finally done things the right way, by hiring a group of legitimately talented online people and then simply letting them do what they were hired to do, without stepping in with the usual draconian corporate-manager concerns that normally drag these projects into the ground. For example, a TV show or movie that's watched there contains the same exact commercial breaks as if you watched it on television, timed at the same exact moments; but at Hulu, only one actual commercial appears before going back to the show, making it not actually that bad to sit through, making the commercials themselves ironically much more watched and hence much more effective than on normal television. Even better, Hulu can prove this in a much more quantifiable way than television networks, with precise visitor numbers that are far more accurate than Nielsen projections. Plus, they've set up the actual commercial distribution in a cutting-edge way, so that new ones are inserted into the slots each time the next visitor there hits "play," keeping all the ads fresh and relevant and thus subject to higher prices from the clients.

But in the meanwhile, the team at Hulu have built a really great, minimalist, useful interface for it all too, with nice simple little buttons surrounding a streaming screen for such things as "popping out" a version to run in the corner of your monitor, "blowing up" the image to the full screen size (which on my high-def television, for example, looks no worse or better than watching an analog-TV signal), getting more information, even watching some shows in full high-definition. And in proud YouTube tradition (something the networks have been dead-set against for a long time), you can even embed anything there as a standalone video over at your own site; here above, for example, for anyone who'd like to sit and watch it right now, is the full half-hour version of the third-season premiere of Tina Fey's hilarious 30 Rock, showing at Hulu right now a full half-week before it's even set to air on television. (Of course, that sadly only applies to you Americans; like many of these network-based sites around the world, Hulu checks the IP address of the visitor, and blocks anyone who's not in the US.) The Hulu team gets the most important lesson of all about this stuff -- that if you embed the commercials in a smart, non-intrusive way, it doesn't matter where the videos are actually shown, because the evidence of people actually watching the commercials keeps getting sent back to your central office, as does the ad revenue. In fact, it's essentially Hulu's viewers doing them a favor, becoming a "local affiliate" of sorts, rebroadcasting whatever they want of Hulu's library in order to draw a crowd themselves, in return for Hulu making money from it.

In effect it's another example of something I'm planning on talking about in more detail soon here at CCLaP in a personal essay; that Hulu is not simply a rebroadcaster of a wealth of back content for these networks, but a brand-new network unto itself, one that creates a new mold and new definition for what a media network can be. It's essentially the personification of something my friends and I used to only jokingly talk about when younger -- an entire national television network with all the resources of any other, but one just for you alone and that only you alone program, so that when it's midnight and you're drunk and you get home and you flip it on, you smile and nod at whatever's showing and think, "Man, that's exactly what I wanted to watch! How do they always know?" But then in another way, it's also a lot like what Matt Thompson talks about in his blog Newsless about Wikipedia, that its real success relies not on just being a cool version of an encyclopedia but precisely on being a whole lot more -- a place that also tackles current events better than many newspapers, that examines controversial issues more fairly than most talk shows, that doubles as a trivia authority, a permanent TV Guide, a Lord Of The Rings encyclopedia, and a whole lot more.

You can look at Hulu in the same terms, I think, once you stop and really start examining the wealth of content now available there: brand-new shows on the air right now; classic shows that are already syndication hits; old shows that have mostly been forgotten; brand-new online-based series, the same stuff you find at FunnyOrDie.com and places along those lines; special compendiums and sneak previews from the networks; occasional live streaming events (for example, they'll be forever known as the answer to the trivia question, "What website was the first in history to live-stream a Presidential debate?"); along with thousands upon thousands of those silly little two-minute clips that teens will love to exchange and load to their phones from now until the end of time. Oh, and let's not forget over 100 full-length movies as well, with more being added each day, all of them again cut with commercials as if watching on television, just with a lot less of them than before. It's essentially like taking a giant place like NBC and handing it to you -- saying, "Here's everything we have, everything we own, now you go and watch whatever you want whenever you want it." Given how different this project could've turned out, I'm pretty astounded that it did end up like this, something of sincere benefit to both the end user and the corporate master, and something I thought worth acknowledging and congratulating the team who's responsible for it. I look forward to many more evenings wasted there.