MARKETING STRATEGY 1: Blackmail you into viewing its hour-long adver-show on Hulu:

Those Hulu users who watch the "Bing-a-thon" will receive a reward: the ability to watch TV shows or movies on hulu.com without commercial interruptions. (Yes, you have to watch a commercial to avoid watching other commercials.)

MARKETING STRATEGY 2: Have product snickered at by television's least funny late night host:

For instance, the segments on "Late Show" will present Mr. Fallon as a quiz master, asking contestants to use bing.com to search for answers to questions in categories like travel, health and shopping.
" ‘Bing' sounds like a Jimmy Fallon word," Mr. Silverman said, laughing.

Here's another Jimmy Fallon word: Shut Up. Google it.
[NYT]

Reports Bercovici:

Speaking last night at an Internet Week event sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter, Jonathan Miller, News Corp.'s newly-installed chief digital officer, said he envisions a future where at least some of the TV shows and movies on Hulu, the premium video site co-owned by News Corp. (NWS), NBC Universal and Disney (DIS), are available only to subscribers.

Bercovici also quoted Miller as saying that the issue could come up as soon as Monday at a Hulu board meeting, though it's not not on the agenda at present. He also closed by saying, "I don't see why over time that shouldn't happen."

Oh well, we suppose that moderately web savvy people will be forced to find ways to illegally circumvent paying for Hulu's content on the internet, just like they always do with everything else they don't feel like paying for.

Soon, You'll Have to Pay For Hulu [Daily Finance]

The search giant is doing its best to stanch large bandwidth losses at its video site ($470 million says Credit Suisse, though Google disputes that). It is thinking about charging for some videos, CEO Eric Schmidt told the New York Times, while the Wall Street Journal reports the company is exploring a deal to offer some videos exclusively to Time Warner cable subscribers.

The two networks are fighting over who gets a deal for ABC shows. The Journal reports Hulu, which now carries NBC and Fox, is the likely winner.

In the meantime, YouTube is offering TV shows like Married with Children and movies like Carrie here, thanks to new deals with studios like Lions Gate, MGM and Sony.

Also in the meantime, pretty much everyone will continue watching Hulu, with its clean interface, crisp-looking video and viewer-friendly commercial options. And the News Corp.-NBC Universal joint venture will continue to have the best shot at turning a profit where the supposed Web geniuses at Google have failed.

ComScore, a Web-traffic measurement firm, reports that visitors to Hulu.com dropped 11 percent from October to November, when it only drew 4.8 million viewers. NBC.com dropped by half, from 14.1 million to 7.2 million. Which only makes sense, says Peter Kafka at MediaMemo, since NBC.com and Hulu were the two places where people could see legal copies of Tina Fey's Palin impressions for Saturday Night Live.

Look, I realize Palin has gone back to Juneau to sort through all the clothing the Republican National Committee bought for her. But new media badly needs some star power. Can't we give her her own YouTube channel or something?

Networks have been experimenting with early releases online for some time now as a way to counteract modern viewing habits such as skipping past all the network promos with a TiVo. But just a couple of weeks ago, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker was telling us all that by not airing Olympic events live or letting viewers watch them online, the network was creating "excitement" via "word of mouth" by withholding the opening ceremonies. Then again, the opening ceremonies in Beijing were actually interesting. The third-place network is correctly guessing that there's no way anybody is going to be eagerly anticipating the new season of Knight Rider — which is going to need all the help it can get.

The stated budget for the series of twelve episodes is $3 million, and the magazine, along with production partner IMG, will guarantee 83.4 million video views on social network Bebo alone — which works out to $35 per thousand, plus whatever Vogue takes off the top. The show will also be distributed on Hulu and Veoh, and on Vogue's online video outlet Vogue.tv, so any views over and above the Bebo number brings the CPM, or cost per thousand views, down for Express.

As one fashionista friend remarked, you wouldn't think Vogue would even let Express advertise in the magazine. Trendy knockoff retailer H&M would seem the better fit. But then I'll be getting enough product placement from the new season of Project Runway.

But the online percentage of that upfront spend has been slow to rise over the few years since YouTube was still being incubated at Sequoia, and remains in the single digits while the advertising industry is bracing for a downturn. At a certain point, VCs will come to their senses and stop subsidizing the bandwidth that makes these sites possible, while cable and network sites and startups like Hulu, with the copyright permissions and the content that sponsors love, will continue to outpace any revenue garnered from user-generated content — which one study estimates will account for only 4 percent of the industry's already paltry online video revenues.

While YouTube has hosted videos over ten minutes in the past, notably including feature film Four Eyed Monsters, in-house Google videos and Charles Trippy's longest YouTube video ever stunt, and early content partners have had the freedom to push the envelope from time to time. But now it's official, and it's certainly in the hopes of garnering better content, running more ads and pumping up "engagement" metrics like average time on site.

YouTube has become the poster child for the old saying "we are losing money on every sale, but we will make it up in volume." YouTube is broken. The reason is Hulu. Hulu posts clips on YouTube. Those clips cost Hulu nothing, generate traffic to its Hulu site on which it sells out. Two areas that Hulu is stomping Youtube: 1. Revenue Per Video 2. Revenue Per User. Hulu has the right to sell advertising in around every video on its site. YouTube has that right for only [a] small percentage of videos because YouTube hides behind the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. By next year, Hulu will have more total revenues than YouTube. The more traffic Hulu generates, the more money it makes. The more traffic YouTube generates, the more money it loses. Maybe they think they will make it up with even more volume?

(Photo by eschipul)

"Redlasso is an online media center for bloggers that records video and audio at the request of the participants of Redlasso's private beta from publicly available signals, such as cable, broadcast and satellite television," rep Saskia Sidenfaden explained. In other words, Redlasso servers watch the closed captioning signals for search terms set up by invited users to notify them of "newsworthy" clips and items. The company then distributes those clips from its own servers to embedded players on third-party sites.

Unlike other sites which rely on the DMCA's takedown provisions — under which users can post copyrighted content, but the site must take it down if copyright owners complain — Redlasso is relying on a "fair use" defense, a provision of copyright law which carves out exceptions for some kinds of reporting and commentary. Fair use rules are often unclear, though, and one question that comes up is whether the use unfairly exploits an existing market for the work. Until recently, it wasn't. But then News Corp. and NBC Universal started up Hulu — which also allows for users to search for clips which they can then embed on third-party sites.

A Redlasso investor explained on background that the startup had been talking to the networks for at least two years, and promised them the ability to track and control usage of their clips as they spread across the Internet — something Google's YouTube couldn't, or didn't want to do. Presumably, the company could have sold their technology to the networks, or formed content partnership agreements.

Hulu offers the same control, but it's run by the networks and offers many of the same features as Redlasso to users, though with significantly more limited content. CBS would have been a great target for possible sale, but CBS recently started working with Hulu, too.

Hence, the company's best hope is to strike a deal before too many more lawyers get involved, especially since it's still planning to close another $15 million in venture investment on top of the $9.4 million already raised. (Photo by AP/Richard Drew)