Dear Hulu,

I don’t have much time today, but wanted to extend an olive branch of sorts. Don’t get me wrong: we still have some fundamental disagreements to work through. For example, I cannot buy into your business model, and I hope you understand why you’re wrong to consider Hulu.com as a rival to your regular channels instead a complement.

However, you have been very good to me during these weeks without a regular television option, and I feel I should return the favor. You have made a tiny tactical error that I believe can be quickly remedied. It’s just my way of saying thank you.
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Okay, I really don’t like the ABC video player. As we continue our living-without-cable/satellite/rabbit ears experiment, we’re trying out all the video services being offered by the major players. I’ve grudgingly conceded that Hulu does a good job, though it still has problems.

The CBS Innertube, while cleverly named, was a rank disappointment. Friends have assured us that you can pause without reverting to the beginning of a show (or a middle that makes no sense), so we might give it another go. I simply wasn’t that fond of the experience beginning to end.

Last week, in honor of the return of Lost, we decided to check out ABC’s version of free online video service. Like the others, this does what it does in an okay manner. Streaming video, especially across a cable connection, isn’t going to be perfect. We are in the nascency of this technology.
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As some you might know, we are sadly (and temporarily) separated from our DirecTV (and TiVo). We had planned to use this separation as a chance to revisit cable, see what was new, and, maybe re-evaluate our television viewing options. Cable failed on every possible level.

While there isn’t much of it to watch, the television that is available right now is good. We have our household favorites lined up like happy brain-busters: Battlestar Galactica, The Office, Lost. Given the fact that the Charter Cable DVR had a 75% failure rate (amazing!), we sought and found alternatives.

Yes, kids, I’m talkin’ about the Hulu.
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Last week, Leslie Moonves — the man we can’t decide if we love or loathe here — received a 29% pay raise with compensation totaling about $36.8 million. Of course, the headlines were filled with chatter about the fate of well-compensated news anchor Katie Couric, so it’s understandable that most of you missed this news.

CBS news is faltering. CBS programming is faltering. Other divisions are doing okay, but if I were the type to own CBS stock, I’d be fuming at the chief executive’s compensation. But that’s neither here nor there…I want to talk about Katie Couric.
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I know this guy who has hundreds of friends on the Facebook. I know another guy who’s trolling for his thousandth friend on the MySpace. I know authors by the score who talk about how many friends they have on this social network or that (LinkedIn geeks, anyone?). Musicians who have built entire careers on their friends list. What if Facebook disappeared tomorrow? Poof! Into the ether. Gone without a trace.

Taking all your friends with it.

Could happen. Could happen at any point. Could happen in a way that you don’t expect. Like, maybe the site doesn’t disappear, but there’s this weird database glitch and 90% of your friends are lost to you. Let’s say this happens, oh, about an hour before you send out a message touting your latest project.
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Whether or not you think that Radiohead’s download-only release of In Rainbows was a success or a failure; a bargain or a rip-off — and there are valid arguments that it was actually all four — you kind of knew that they weren’t the only artist of their stature who were going to try to bypass the traditional Major-Label release strategy.

And, sure enough, after what can only be described as a collective pause while everybody held their breath, in the past couple of weeks, we’ve had at least four artists with established fanbases follow in their footsteps. While each artist is doing something different, they’re all taking a piece from Radiohead’s playbook.

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Since I was running short of things to worry about, I turned my attention to fact that today’s youth are not learning something called “executive function”. Far as I can tell, this is child psychologist-speak for what we used to call self-control. Okay, self-control mixed with internal dialogue.

Back in my day — when I organized a cadre of easily swayed youth into digging storm tunnels to prepare for an eventual tornado (knowing, of course, even at that tender age, that tornadoes are highly uncommon along the Central Coast of California) as part of ongoing game loosely based on the “Little House on the Prairie” books (in addition to serving as commander-in-chief of the tunnel diggers, I also held the exalted position of being the only one who had read all the books) — kids went wild with the imagination and free play. We built elaborate games, either for single players or groups, with sets of rules and roles.
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I’m having an “argh” moment. Hulu.com long rumored, long in beta, has finally launched. Hurray! The company has lined up most of the majors and has a good library of content (though, 200 premium titles doesn’t really seem like that much; apparently, there’s a good selection of back catalog now and coming online soon). However, will all good things, a little rain must fall.

Let’s forget for a moment that Hulu has built a business model that doesn’t offer choice. If you choose Hulu, you choose advertising. Sure, you get lots of content choice, but, well, advertising. As the iTunes store has proven, people will pay for content. Why not offer a choice? Why not mix up the business model to reach the widest range of customers.
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Bill St. Arnaud says:

. . . My personal interpretation on David’s comments is that cablecos and telcos have entered into a contract with users to provide access to the “Internet”. The Internet is not a product or service developed by exclusively by the cablecos or telcos for use and enjoyment by their customers, as for example traditional cell phone service. Since the Internet is a global service with its own set of engineering principles, guidelines and procedures, implicit in providing access to the Internet is, in essence, an unwritten contract to adhere to those recognized standards such as the end2end principle. No one questions the need for traffic management, spam control and other such services, but they should be done in way that is consistent within open and transparent engineering practices that are part and parcel of the contract with the user in providing access to the global Internet.

• Bill St. Arnaud on David Reed at FCC (could find a direct link to the original source, so here’s a link to the quote via another source. Say that three times fast.)

For those of us who make a habit of predicting the future, the recent demise of HD-DVD was an inevitability. Press reports indicated that a mere 600,000 standalone units had been sold to consumers. My notes from last year’s SXSW festival indicate that half a million total HD-DVD/Blu-Ray players were in the market — obviously, sales didn’t skyrocket. After all the fanfare and hype, the consumer shrugged.

Of course, the consumer — or that portion of consumers who invested in HD-DVD technology — lost. This does not bode well for the motion picture industry, and you’ve got to wonder who will be fired for failing to gauge the mood of the DVD-purchasing public. Just as many people predicted the disaster of the Iraq war, many of us saw how this made-up DVD format war would end.
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