It's been a busy week for mega online video streaming service Hulu. In between putting the finishing touches on a major deal with Disney to incorporate content from ABC, ESPN and likely movies from the Mouse House, they've apparently found time to contemplate asking users questions during ad breaks and to once again throw up spurious roadblocks to getting Hulu content onto actual television screens.

According to Silicon Alley Insider, the Disney-Hulu partnership has been brewing for some time and is now all but a done deal. It would give the company a 30% share of Hulu, putting them on equal footing with News Corp. and NBC Universal and committing them to a $50 million marketing spend to promote the video portal. It would also leave CBS as the only major network not partying at the Hulu mansion.

Meanwhile, Hulu is reportedly working with advertisers to possibly introduce question prompts to users in lieu of some traditional video ad spots. This would be an attempt to squeeze more revenue out of the site via interactive ad targeting, allowing Hulu to build profiles of users based on behavior and demographic information collected. This move could also have the side effect of further complicating the Hulu via third party apps war akin to the ongoing tiff between Hulu and Boxee; some media extender implementations retain cursor control for the user but in the case of the PlayOn Digital Media Server, for example, what you see on your TV screen is actually being converted on the fly by your PC and sent to your game console in a different format. Introducing a mandatory interactive ad could be troublesome for an implementation like PlayOn's, although it does shield them from other types of attacks like the latest episode in the Hulu-Boxee kerfuffle we'll be talking about next.

 

For those who need a recap on the saga, Hulu's content partners have historically been extremely skittish about allowing Hulu content anywhere other than in your web browser— specifically, they don't want their TV on your TV. Over the past couple of months, Hulu has been playing a cat and mouse game with popular media center application Boxee, erecting new types of content blocks almost as fast as Boxee has been working around them to restore Hulu service.

In the latest episode, Hulu has encrypted its HTML content at the source, in an attempt to deny access to anything but a web browser whose Javascript engine can decrypt the signal on the other side. That act knocks out third party applications and pluginsthat aren't browsers or natively based on browsers. However, it didn't take long for Boxee to implement a counter to the block, which works by making the software essentially present itself to Hulu exactly as if it were a regular web browser. We tested the PlayOn server just now and found that it too is still happily serving up Hulu content, presumably because whatever engine is sucking down the content on your PC is based on the browser technology Hulu expects to see from a real browser.ZeeVee's Zinc is also unaffected by the block, as Zinc is essentially a Firefox extension that presents internet video content in a user interface friendlier to the big screen.

And so it goes. The irony is, Hulu's "content partners" aka owners seem to be confused by their own success. In the usual order of things, wild traffic growth and a userbase clamoring to get your service onto more and more devices would be great problems to have. The networks are lamenting that customers partaking of their content online is cutting into the better ad money on broadcast television, and that the money just isn't there yet online while video streaming infrastructure costs are high. Well, guess what? Those customers are leaving broadcast television to get content online on demand anyway, and that trend will continue. The networks will have to decide if they want to be the ones on the other end to receive when their customers get there, or not. Either figure out how to track ad inventory wherever it's distributed and convince advertisers of its value, or charge me a subscription fee and let me watch Hulu wherever it can be piped to. I'll put my stake in the ground in that I would happily pay $5-10 bucks a month for that kind of service; anyone else with me?

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