It's here, sort of. Several months after the big announcement that content from Disney's ABC Entertainment division would be coming to Hulu, the entertainment conglomerate's shows have started arriving.
The primetime drama "Grey's Anatomy" debuted on the video hub Monday, and more shows will roll out over the next two weeks.
These include, according to Hulu, consistent hits like "Desperate Housewives" and "Scrubs," along with more recent additions to the network such as "I Survived A Japanese Game Show."
Disney joined Hulu in April, giving it a joint stake in the company alongside NBC Universal, News Corp., and investor Providence Equity Partners. Shows from ABC as well as ABC-owned cable channels like SoapNet and ABC Family are on the way, along with movies from Disney (though no titles have been made available yet).
Would-be Hulu rival Joost closed its consumer video service last month after its peer-to-peer technology failed to make up for its tepid content offering.
My big question: When will we see episodes of my favorite ABC show, "Lost," on Hulu? I've e-mailed a company representative to find out.
Ashton Kutcher
(Credit: Andrew Mager/CBS Interactive)
What a pairing: Hollywood slacker-hottie icon Ashton Kutcher and Silicon Valley slacker-hottie icon Kevin Rose have teamed up to create 24 Hours at Sundance, a Web-based reality show set at the eponymous film festival in Park City, Utah, later this week.
Backed by mobile live-streaming start-up Qik, the competition-focused show will pit four "social media mavens" against one another for 24 straight hours as they complete a set of challenges surrounding the annual film festival and broadcast them via Qik software on Nokia handsets. Rose (best known for founding Digg) and Kutcher, the Dude, Where's My Car actor whose production company Katalyst Media has created a Web show called Blah Girls, will co-host.
The four "social media mavens" are VentureBeat editor Matt Marshall, gadget blogger Meghan Asha, Konsole Kingz founder CJ Peters, and video blog personality Irina Slutsky.
"I kind of feel like there's been a trend in entertainment in general that moves toward a more visceral, more live experience," Kutcher told CNET News. "We have an idea of what we want to happen, but who knows what's actually going to happen."
Kevin Rose
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)"I don't think I've ever heard of anything else that's been done like this before, especially with the real time nature," Rose added. "It's only a matter of time before people in Hollywood and just everyone in general wants to participate and have a way to live-stream and connect with people they care about." Well, maybe not everyone.
From what it sounds like, dot-com culture geeks may find this fairly amusing. Kutcher told CNET News that one of the challenges will involve tracking down and interviewing dot-com icon Jason Calacanis, who will be present at Sundance. The Weblogs Inc. and Mahalo founder relocated to the L.A. area several years ago and has started to get a foothold in the Hollywood scene.
"It's unbelievable, it's like him versus (Robert) DeNiro for roles," Kutcher joked of Calacanis, who played himself in last year's film August, which chronicled a failing fictional dot-com. "It's getting out of control."
Looks like offering old episodes of Star Trek and MacGyver proved successful: CBS Interactive announced this week that it has added a selection of new "classic TV" content to its CBS Audience Network of online video partners.
Full episodes and clips of select seasons from Twin Peaks, Beverly Hills: 90210, The Love Boat, Family Ties, and Perry Mason are now available on CBS' 300-plus partner sites, which include downloadable video service Joost, AOL and its newly acquired social network Bebo, video-sharing site Veoh, and a few hardware partners like Slingbox. CBS has also added more seasons of MacGyver, The Twilight Zone, and Hawaii Five-O to complement what it first started offering in February.
CBS has not signed on to Hulu, the joint online-video venture currently run by NBC Universal and News Corp., but CBS Interactive President Quincy Smith has said that it's still a possibility.
Disclosure: News.com is published by CNET Networks, which is a current CBS Audience Network partner and is expected to become a part of CBS in an acquisition set to close in the third quarter.
An array of classic TV shows from CBS are now available online, the network's CBS Interactive division announced Thursday.
Full-length episodes of Star Trek, Melrose Place, Hawaii Five-O, MacGyver, and The Twilight Zone have been added to the lineup of the company's CBS Audience Network, as well as its central streaming-video site. All of it is free and ad-supported; only select seasons of each show are currently available, but CBS has hinted that more episodes, as well as additional TV shows, will go up in the near future.
Five classic CBS shows, now playing at a browser near you.
(Credit: CBS)The CBS Audience Network consists of more than 300 partners, including video-sharing start-ups such as Joost and Veoh, social networks such as Bebo, portals such as AOL and Microsoft, as well as a number of other companies and Web sites. Among them is CNET Networks, publisher of News.com.
But at least for now, you won't be seeing these TV shows, or any other CBS content, on the nascent online-video hub Hulu. Despite rumors that additional players, such as Viacom and Time Warner, are close to jumping on board, the site remains a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp.
NBC Universal, meanwhile, announced on Tuesday that it will similarly stream online a number of its classic TV shows, including The A-Team, Kojak, and Buck Rogers. But instead of openly syndicating them, as CBS plans to do, NBC's streaming operations will be centered on genre sites such as SleuthChannel.com, ChillerTV, and SciFi.com, as well as on NBC's own video site and Hulu.
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