Disney signs onto Hulu

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.

[karpenterskids]

This is the best news I've heard all week!

Can't wait to see Disney-owned shows start to pop up on Hulu.

[jlopezcnet]

Now all HULU has to do is fix their danged media player so that I can view my videos at full screen 480p! Have you tried to watch the 480p at full screen? It gives me motion sickness. The work around is to change your flash player to low quality.

What a bummer....

[karpenterskids]

When you try watching it at high-quality full-screen, does it seem choppy sometimes?

If so...it may be your video card.
I've tried doing that on my Macbook, with the same choppy result, but it works perfectly on my upgraded PC, as well as on my college lab computers, which have even bigger monitors.

[ncalishome]

Weird... I've never had that problem. What OS/browser/Flash version are you on?

[Spartan_458]

I don't know what you're using, but I do that exact thing, and the quality is superb and the picture is nice and smooth. I'm using Firefox 3 and I have Intel graphics, so, nothing amazing.

[ncalishome]

@jlopezcnet -- Might be a Flash plug-in problem on Mac. I dual-boot, and I tried it in OS X and 480p sucks as you say (on the same hardware). I asked another Mac friend who uses Hulu a lot and he has the same thing going on and gave up on 480p. My company does a ton of Flash development, and all Flash plugins are not the created equal as many nub Flash devs and Adobe would lead you to believe. We cross-browser/cross platform test all of our work and it's proved worth the effort many, many times.

[ncalishome]

Here's a thread on the subject http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1666546&tstart=0

[paulsecic]

I don't have any problems on HULU.. But Youtube's TV shows are in low quality. They look as bad as their pirate clips.

[thenet411]

TRON FTW!

[nopinktoday]

Next stop, Youtube! Disney is slowly taking over the world we cherish or partially cherish. =D

[judsoncollier]

Yes yes yes!!! This is the best news ever.

[stigmattaman]

Any word on if the Espn properties will go on Hulu?

[Dalkorian]

The evil empire has again grown .... cue the Imperial Death March.