Webware

Movie and TV show streaming service Hulu on Monday added tagging to the mix, allowing users to add up to 30 tags to each piece of content for the sake of organization. These tags also work site-wide, which means that users can see all types of related content regardless of whether it's a TV show or feature-length film.

Users have two choices for tagging: one is creating an all-new tag, while the other is to vote up a tag someone else has made. Each time a user does this it adds to the number, giving certain tags more validity, although unlike size-based systems it's not as immediately clear which tags are more popular or common. Users can also delete tags, but only their own--meaning that if there is a bad tag placed by another user there's no way to report it.

Hulu's new tagging system is part public, part private and works on all content.

(Credit: CNET)

Tags are made public and can be seen by other users immediately, although they do not yet appear to be an integrated part of Hulu's search engine. Instead, users can search for a specific tag within the tag section of each video. It's also worth noting that some content on Hulu has an expiration date, so you can spend all the time in the world tagging videos, but something you tagged a few months ago might not be able to be watched at a later date.

One thing Hulu could do with tags (but probably won't) is add timing to the mix. Recently-launched (although still in private beta) AnyClip organizes movie clips by what's happening in them. Hulu could do the same thing with its content by giving users a way to tag by time the way video host Viddler does. Though again, this wouldn't be nearly as useful as AnyClip due to Hulu's frequent content expirations.

Worth noting is that competitor YouTube has long had tags for its hosted movies and TV shows. However, it does not let users add them.

The television season is about to arrive full force.

Soon, most of your favorite television shows, as well as new series, will be making their way into your home. But if you're unsure when your show will come back, you want to catch up, or you simply want to track the show as the season progresses, I have you covered with some great sites.

Let's check them out.

Tracking TV

Hulu...There are few better ways to track your favorite shows than to watch them on Hulu, which is backed by NBC Universal, ABC, and Fox.

Thanks to strategic partnerships that Hulu inked with networks, finding and watching your favorite shows is quick and easy. And since the site is ad-supported, you won't need to worry about doling out cash to watch your shows.

I spend considerable time on Hulu. I caught up with last season's of "Family Guy" on the site. The videos run well. The ads, while a necessary evil, aren't that bad. And the quality is outstanding. Even better, you can embed Hulu videos into your blog, making it a great platform to share your favorite shows with friends.

Hulu has outstanding video quality.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

MyTVRSS...When you first get to MyTVRSS, you'll probably be a little sickened by its design. A black background sitting behind pink type makes the site an extremely unattractive target for your attention. But once you realize you'll spend very little time there, you'll get past it.

MyTVRSS lists every television show currently in production. When you click on one of the links on that site, you'll find a show summary, information on the last episode that aired (assuming it isn't a new show), and the series premiere's date and time. Unfortunately, not all the show listings are as informative as I would have liked. For instance, the site's "The Office" page was great. But its "30 Rock" page didn't feature nearly as much information. Your mileage will vary.

As you sift through all the shows on the site, you can pick those series that you watch most often by checking the box next to their titles. At the bottom of the page is a "Create Feed" option. When you click that button, you'll receive a unique RSS feed that you can add to your reader. That feed will alert you when your shows air. For someone like me who easily forgets a favorite show is on, it's a nice service to have.

MyTVRSS is certainly an ugly site.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Boxee, a New York-based start-up that makes "media center" software, announced Wednesday that it has raised $6 million in a Series B financing round led by General Catalyst Partners. Existing investors Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital also participated in the round.

Boxee raised its series A round, to the tune of $4 million, last November. With the new financing the company hopes to ink more deals with media companies and set-top box manufacturers, as well as hire more employees to keep building out its technology (which includes a developer platform). Currently in an alpha test phase, Boxee hopes to expand to a beta test in October.

More deals will also help Boxee gain some industry cred. It has still been unable to convince Hulu, now the big name in premium online video, to reverse a ban on Boxee's access to its content--which includes a huge library from NBC Universal, News Corp., and Disney's ABC Entertainment.

"I think that the best thing that we could do in order to become partners with Hulu is, on one end, work with other media companies so they see that Boxee is overall a friendly company to content owners," CEO Avner Ronen told CNET News. "And the second is that we need to grow our footprint, we need to grow our user base, we need to get on more digital devices, and I think if we do those things it will open the opportunity up for us to partner with Hulu."

"Our belief is that, eventually, content owners need to follow the users," Ronen said.

Blurring the line between computer and TV just a tad more, video-streaming site Hulu puts its content front and center with a new desktop app for Windows and Mac. Introduced via Hulu's new Labs testing bed, Hulu Desktop is one of four new apps in Labs. The other three include a Video Panel designer for customizing the look of Hulu embeds, a recommendations list, and original air date-based browsing--but Hulu Desktop is the only one available for download.

Hulu's new desktop app on a Windows XP computer.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

There are some stringent limitations to getting the desktop client to run properly, although if your system meets their standards, you'll get to play with some cool features. Windows users must have at least an Intel Pentium Core Duo, with a 1.8GHz processor and 2GB of RAM running Windows XP. Mac users need an Intel Pentium Core Duo, with a 2.0GHz and 2GB of RAM running OS X 10.4 (Tiger). Both Windows and Mac users should have at least a 2 Mbps Internet connection, and Flash 9.0.124 or later is a must.

Once running, the desktop client offers a smooth and reasonable facsimile of the features users should be familiar with from Hulu on the Web. You can use a Windows Media Center remote or an Apple remote to control it, further emphasizing the computer as a TV. Using the standard maximize window button in the upper-right corner of the pane will give you full-screen viewing.

Mouse over the video in the windowed mode to reveal the title of the video playing, its user rating, duration, and a button to jump to the main menu up at the top. A video progress timeline, volume control, buffer status, and video quality indicators live on the bottom. A handy preview pane appears when you mouse over the timeline.

The Hulu Desktop main menu.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

The Web-based Hulu navigation in the menu remains the same. A scroll bar on the left smoothly moves from Now Playing down through Recently Added, TV, and Movies. A search feature available from a magnifying glass icon allows for Hulu-wide searching, and the scroll bar's Search option opens up a slick-feeling virtual keyboard.

In my testing, I encountered no stability issues, although some users have noted other results. The Hulu Desktop beta is currently free, although there's no indication from Hulu whether that will change in the future.

Want to feel old? This album came out 15 years ago.

Hulu will live-stream a concert for the first time: Dave Matthews Band at New York's Beacon Theater on June 1.

The online video hub, which announced the event Thursday, will be the only place streaming the concert live, at least legally.

Pop culture brush-up: the Dave Matthews Band was really, really, really huge in the '90s, known for lengthy live jams, for a Phish-like cult following that skewed more preppy than hippie, and for "Ants Marching," which was inescapable if you ever got anywhere near a frat house between 1994 and 1997. People generally loved them or hated them back then, due in no small part to the fact that they were the soundtrack of choice for the jocks rather than the indie kids or nerds.

It's a good fit for Hulu's first live concert broadcast--the site's first live streaming event was a presidential debate last October. The Dave Matthews Band's original Gen-X and Gen-Y fan base is exactly the demographic of 20- and 30-somethings--though not necessarily tech-savvy ones--who would tune into a concert stream online. And conveniently, the date of the show is the day before the band's long-anticipated new album, "Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King," hits stores online and offline.

Frontman Dave Matthews was, on an unrelated note, one of the first mainstream musicians to use Twitter actively.

Hulu, meanwhile, is riding the wave of mainstream success in the wake of an edgy TV ad campaign and the big news that Disney would be joining News Corp. and NBC Universal as a partner in the joint venture.

Disney's ABC Enterprises announced Thursday that it has entered into online-video joint venture Hulu, currently a partnership between NBC Universal, News Corp., and investor Providence Equity Partners.

This means that TV shows from Disney-owned channels like ABC, SoapNet, and ABC Family will be coming to Hulu. Among them are "Lost," "Grey's Anatomy," "Ugly Betty," and "Scrubs." There will also be Disney movies available on the ad-supported streaming video site, but a press release did not name any of them. Content will be available "soon," the press release explained.

Reports started to surface about a month ago that Disney was in talks to join Hulu.

Robert Iger, president and CEO of the Walt Disney Company, will take a seat on Hulu's board of directors, along with Anne Sweeney, co-chair of Disney Media Networks and president of the Disney/ABC Television Group, and Kevin Mayer, executive vice president of corporate strategy, business development, and technology at Disney.

ABC already streams a significant amount of television content on ABC.com, and Disney-owned television and video content was some of the first to make an appearance in the iTunes Store's video download section.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is Disney's single biggest shareholder, having sold animation studio Pixar to the company in 2006.

This post was expanded at 8:15 a.m. PT.

Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that a dedicated Hulu application is indeed on its way to the iPhone and should be here in just a few months.

SAI says the application will work over Wi-Fi and AT&T's 3G network, meaning that users will be able to view programming anywhere with a fast data connection.

Rumors suggesting that an iPhone-friendly version of Hulu swirled around this time last year, however, they predated the launch of the App Store, and Hulu flat-out denied that one was being worked on.

This time around, though, it's far more plausible, with the upcoming iPhone OS 3.0 software update, which lets developers bake streaming media into their applications. For Hulu, this means that the advertising could be stuck into the mobile stream and that users would be able to watch videos without leaving the application.

One of the things that keep this rumor from holding water is that Hulu is in direct competition with Apple's iTunes business. Users of Hulu can watch ad-supported, full-length television shows and movies on their personal computers for free, instead of paying Apple to download a copy for offline viewing.

If such an app were available on the iPhone, it would also offer portable TV and movie watching, something not yet offered in Apple's own mobile iTunes app, which is limited to video podcasts. In past instances of this, the company has simply denied applications such as Podcaster from making it through the app approval process, only to launch it as a first party feature later on.

On the other hand, some of Hulu's competitors have already gotten a foot in the door, including Joost and CBS-owned TV.com, which has its own iPhone application that streams in content in chunks. In addition, Google's YouTube, whose application comes preinstalled on the iPhone, has recently reached an agreement with major studios, including Sony Pictures, Lions Gate Entertainment, and CBS (publisher of CNET News), to offer visitors full-length TV shows and feature films.

If Hulu can't manage to pull off getting advertisements in the stream, using this system, it would be fairly simple to force users to sit through advertisements between clips.

More than 800 digital-media enthusiasts in New York RSVP'd for a Tuesday night "meet-up" held by Boxee, the TV browser software company that's ambitiously (and controversially) aimed to make it possible to have a full Web content experience in your living room.

Right now, Boxee sources content from outlets such as Comedy Central, Netflix, CBS (which publishes CNET News), and Web video content hubs such as Blip.tv and Next New Networks.

In conjunction with the get-together, Boxee (still available only for Mac and Linux) made a few notable announcements: First of all, it's overhauled its application program interface (API)--which was only three weeks old to begin with--so that developers can build more complex applications for the platform.

There are a few new ones at launch: streaming-radio provider Pandora now has an application to bring its content to Boxee, as well as terrestrial-radio hub RadioTime. A third-party company called BoxeeHQ has also created an app to stream content from PBS.

Boxee's content-browsing software is now built on the XUL framework, which makes it a "remote cousin of Firefox," CEO Avner Ronen said. It will detect a video in a regular Web page and then attempt to pull it into a full-screen view. Guess what this means: Content from Hulu will be back, at least for now.

For those who stepped in late: Hulu, the joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp., had been available as a channel on Boxee until access was blocked at the request of content partners. Boxee brought it back by pulling in Hulu's RSS feed, but then Hulu blocked that too.

Still in alpha test mode, Boxee has gained a loyal following among geeks who love its hackability, futurists who see it as the best hope for the why-won't-it-happen-already convergence between TV and the Web, and people fed up with subscription cable services. But on the flip side, it's still unclear as to how the start-up will dig through the complicated stratigraphy of media industry regulations, and it's also unclear as to how it will make money.

Ronen hinted that an "app store" format will be part of its strategy, letting developers charge for their applications and taking a cut of sales, in addition to advertising. Also down the pipeline: an improved search feature that will let members search all Boxee content at once rather than only within individual content providers one at a time.

Boxee also released its first iPhone app this month. It's not a video app, though--it's an app to remotely control the Boxee browser over a Wi-Fi connection. Ronen says the company's received "great feedback" on it.

Video hub Hulu now lets its members amass friends lists much like a standard social-networking service, the site said Thursday.

You can now invite friends from your e-mail address books or Facebook and MySpace accounts, and then see a feed of what your friends have been watching, commenting on, or subscribing to.

In the event that you find this creepy or don't want your boss to catch on to the fact that you watch reruns of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia all day long you can disable these activity-feed features.

The announcement comes in conjunction with the one-year anniversary of Hulu's public debut. To mark the occasion, the NBC Universal-News Corp. joint venture will introduce over the next week a "bevy of new shows, more seasons of user favorites, and classic cartoons and movies."

Also new: a sort of trends page with rankings of the most e-mailed, searched, and embedded videos, as well as editors favorites. Not surprisingly, Saturday Night Live is a huge hit, and the most-searched name on the site is "Palin."

On the less pleasant side of things, Hulu's one-year anniversary comes at a time when the site is dealing very publicly with the invariable old media-new media gulf: pressure from content owners caused the site to ax its support for buzzworthy video software maker Boxee earlier this month.