Just went to the wrong page on Hulu and they managed to both entertain me and make money off me - they’re selling overlay ads on video on their 404 error page.

Above: Hulu’s 404 Error video

Corey Adds: Not one to pick on one of the best in the biz, and hell, it is only a 404 page - and a funny one at that - but the mismatched ads isn’t something that advertisers like to see too much.

Overlay during video:

End frame:

Corey Adds II: Looks fixed. Overlays and last frames from the same advertisers today.

If you haven’t yet seen Joss Whedon’s self described web-ministeries Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and still want to you’re going to have to pay for it. After being streamed last week exclusively on DrHorrible.com delivered by Hulu, the three part series is now available as an i-Tunes download for $3.99 or $1.99 per act.

And buy it soon, the series is only available on i-Tunes until July 29th after which, “sometime later”, a DVD will be released with extra features. Some are already speculating that a sequel is in the works, more details  will be announced Comic-Con later this week in what should be a publicity shit show.

In his “Master Plan” Whedon writes that he is seeking to change the traditional distribution business:

Once upon a time, all the writers in the forest got very mad with the Forest Kings and declared a work-stoppage. The forest creatures were all sad; the mushrooms did not dance, the elderberries gave no juice for the festival wines, and the Teamsters were kinda pissed. (They were very polite about it, though.) During this work-stoppage, many writers tried to form partnerships for outside funding to create new work that circumvented the Forest King system.

Frustrated with the lack of movement on that front, I finally decided to do something very ambitious, very exciting, very mid-life-crisisy. Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.

The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet. To show how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way. To give the public (and in particular you guys) something for all your support and patience. And to make a lot of silly jokes. Actually, that sentence probably should have come first.

And based on buzz alone it’s been pretty successful. AdRants puts it well: “Whedon knows damn well how to build a cult following…the ‘net may just prove his biggest cash cow yet.”

In case you couldn’t make it, here’s what you missed. Presenters included Hulu’s Kevin McGurn, Move Networks’ Bob Bryson, Boxee’s Avner Ronen, MediaMerx’s Tejpaul Bhatia,and Matt Cutler from Visible Measures.

Moderator: Jamison Tilsner, Tilzy.TV
TS Kelly, Mediacontacts
Randy Kilgore, Tremor Media
Kevin McGurn, Hulu
Peter Naylor, NBC Universal
Tim Shey, New Next Networks

Do Independent Video Producers Stand a Chance Against the Big Boys?

Tim: NNN is the home of Obama girl, and now McCain girl, which became the #1 video on YouTube within the first 12 hours of its launch. NNN has embraced the idea of super distribution. We’ve embraced as many formats and outlets as possible, while still controlling the advertising and monetization of the content.

Tilz: Could the talent behind IndyMogul (NNN channel) have had the same success on their own?
Tim: There is a certain point in business where things start to get really interesting. We’d been working a bit with lots of the early web video producers. When a video property starts to gain serious traction, they need to ask, “Ok, now what?” So when a lot of people like this all want to do the same thing, there is economy of scale. What we thought about was how not to make the original audiences, that made these shows popular, suffer through the monetization process.

Tilz: How important is the marketing effort in order to gain traction?
Tim: When we first launched, we didn’t care if we got 15k views per month. We wanted organic growth. There is always a way to drive traffic. You can go to Yahoo and turn on the traffic, but then you don’t know if you really have something good. Once we establish that the content is good, we can go out and do deals around them.

Kevin: Hulu starts mostly with professionally produced content that already has an audience. But for other content, we use what our editors think is cool, and also what is popular on the site. They aren’t always the same. We want to make video as viral as possible. If you think your friends would like a video, we want you to be able to share it. Things on the web don’t have to be an instant success. In fact, they generally aren’t, unless they were popular somewhere else first.

Tilz: I noticed that Hulu has adopted some of the made for web content. DadLabs, Abigale’s Teenage Diary, for example.

Kevin: All of our content is professionally produced, and high quality. Hulu is a high resolution, high quality player, which is a barrier to entry for a lot of user generated content. Hulu is going to be the biggest aggregator of professionally produced content. Video can be shot on a small budget, but still have quality.

Tilz: How do you see a fragmented market as an ad agency?

TS: Size matters. Sometimes it’s the motion of the ocean. It’s the motion for the smaller producers. We look at a lot of data to figure out what is working. We educate, test, and prove performance. We have to mesh all of this data together to figure it all out, but in the end, its about getting people into stores and buying product. Our job is to be able to interpret data for our clients. In the past it was a lot easier. There is a tremendous need for analytics.

Randy: If TV is the goliath, we are all Davids right now.

TS: I don’t need to worry about aggregating content, and don’t look at video in isolation. I just need to prove it worked. I look at the relationship of video and search, video and display.

Randy: The other goliath is the unknown. We want to shed light on it, but it is hard right now. The time, effort and innovation is what will allow us to ‘slay the monster.’

Peter: It is very difficult to compare the web and TV. Its not squares and squares. Its squares and circles. You’ve got evergreen content on the web. You can take all these clips and aggregate them into niche networks. But the content was used one way in one medium, and is used differently on the web.

Tilz: NBC and Hulu are selling ads across their entire library?
Peter & Kevin: Yes.

Tilz: What stops you from using all the data that TS describes?

Kevin: We are using it. We are doing a crawl, walk, run approach. But we have demographic data, and profiling data, and targeting data, and can share that with buyers to help them plan. The agencies are tasked with marrying that to the adserver data that they have. But you have a heightened level of information that you can’t get anywhere else. With Dynamic Logic and Insight Express, you can add even more data to help plan your next campaign.

Peter: Networks have only really been streaming shows for 24 months. Our advertisers get the first look at the data we gather on how people are consuming the content.

TS: There is a level of expectation for accountability for how things work online. We are presenting results to our clients in multiple forms. We use ecommerce data. We use whatever we have to show that a campaign works. Advertisers are now coming to us to help them produce content. Its like the 50s all over again.

Tilz: Jeff Zucker said he wants to avoid going to niche. That seems at odds with some of the current content producers.
Peter: He was talking specifically about broadcast. When he is talking about broadcast, he’s talking about creating “tentpole” events that people gather around. When it comes to niche content, look at some of our investments. We’ve invested in DriverTV, which is for automotive shoppers. We have an investment for pet owners. So overall, we are placing bets everywhere – broad and niche.

Tilz: What should be the definitive success metric?
TS: Sales. There are so many moving parts.

Randy: You really need to be consultative. You need to do a lot of the blocking and tackling. But each client has their own set of success metrics, and that is what is critical to us. But that is also what makes it difficult to do one-offs.

Kevin: There isn’t a standard across the board. Your ad opportunities vary based on the content. People need to back off of engagement. What you choose to do with an ad impression is up to the client. Understand your audience, see which ones are performing the best, and optimize. We’ve got both brand and direct response metrics to measure and work with.

Tim: As a programming company, we are relying on a lot of the people on the stage to figure that out. We can’t focus on developing the next behavioral targeting technology. But we need to get on board with some metric as an industry just so we can all have a conversation around a common metric. In the meantime, we sell a lot of sponsorships and integrate our sponsors very organically.

Q&A:
Lloyd Truffelman, Trylon: What can we learn about the “inversion” that we were talking about earlier. People sit down to “see what is on TV.” How are we going to find content?
Kevin: It is about the individual, and a network of trusted friend, trusted sources. And then you look at what those networks are doing. Personalized platforms. But we need “one number” across all platforms that allows us to measure all of this. We’re going to need to find a common language.

Tim: We are still betting on brands. Even as blogging was taking apart the publishing industry, there were plenty of outlets popping up to become your brand that you trust to help you find the content you love. Brands haven’t gone away, they are just evolving in the way they communicate with people.

Randy: It is exciting now that there are so many people creating content for the digital space. But it is not going to stay that way for ever. The big guns, people that can make things happen, are getting involved. CAA was at the Digital NewFront presentation. There will always be some opportunity to be innovative and get yourself known, but that opportunity will shrink.

Tim: There is great stuff out there. We need to bring the content from the end of the tail and push it up to the head. That’s what Hulu is doing with recommending content.

In a move much wiser than the WB made a few weeks ago, Comedy Central has begun a test offering of John Stewart’s Daily Show and Steven Cobert’s The Colbert Report on Web TV portal Hulu.

Just as Netflix has become the go-to destination for all things DVD, Hulu is quickly living up to its promise and potential to become the first stop for users looking for TV content online. The addition of a 480p viewing option is also very much appreciated by those of us streaming web content to our TVs.

With monetization rights management tools like FreeWheel hitting the market, syndicated content owners are getting the ad revenue they rightfully deserve, removing the risk to hyper syndication of content. We’ll be seeing more deals like this as specific destination sites become the one-stop-shop for the content you are looking for. YouTube’s quality, and lack of formal distribution deals with broadcasters, won’t cut it for long…..unless you still want to watch “Dog on Skateboard.”

At this morning’s Streaming Media East keynote, NBC Universal Chief Digital Officer George Kliavikoff talked up NBC’s original digital programming strategy, the future of Hulu and expressed optimism that a new iTunes deal may be near.

On Apple:
All we want to do in any distribution agreement is to set the wholesale price…on every platform and with every partner in the world with the exception of one, we’ve gotten to set that price.

I applaud the moves that have been made lately by Apple. In the UK now there is variable pricing…the deal with HBO content…that we love. So things are moving in the right direction.

On piracy:
We want our partners to help the industry combat piracy…if you think short term it’s great for consumers to get everything for free…but eventually the money runs out…if we in a consumer friendly way alert people that what they’re doing is illegal and offer an alternative…this has nothing to do with DRM.

For example when Hulu content is uploaded somewhere else presumably we can use technology to detect that and push consumers to the place where that content is available legally.

YouTube has done a pretty good job lately of filtering what’s on their site…but you turn back the clock six months on any of the big UGC sites, it’s rampant.

We’re aggressive about making sure our stuff comes down from YouTube,.YouTube has an active program where we can start pre-filtering some of that stuff and they’ve made great strides in the last couple months…if you create a great experience over time people will migrate to that great experience…what we did with Hulu.

On Predictive Marketing and Original Digital Content
For the company the cable model has been hugely successful, focus on a particular community (for example Bravo has a very specific audience) Filter by top ten advertising categories. Focus on undeserved: We ventured to create a set of content verticals “digital cable networks if you will” where advertisers can spend their money…we do syndication deals with sites that are particular in that genre.

We launched about a month ago our auto channel, DriverTV.com, we went into the marketplace, found the absolute best content…all HD, ”it’s really like car porn” we syndicate it across large websites, that particular content is great because they’re [reaching] an in-market consumer so we get paid by Cadillac….Revenue we generate we’re going to reinvest in original car content.

The Health Network – we produce in excess of 120 videos a week, that had aired once on TV and syndicate them online. Yourtotalhealth, launched with a bunch of syndication partners.

In these niche categories they’re almost sold before we make them. In the case of autos the car companies get to use that footage so it’s almost no cost, and in the case of the Health Network it’s footage we already have.

On The Future of Hulu
I think in three years from now if they do their job well…it will be a one stop shop for a lot of great content…I happen to be biased but I think it’s the best user experience on the internet today….I think also this strategy they have of allowing anyone to take any section of a video and embed it anywhere in the world is great…also other devices, TV, Mobile, continuing to work closely with advertisers to…use the interactivity of the platforms.

On the CBS-CNET Deal:
I can’t wait for it to close because I can’t wait for CBS content to be on Hulu…all kidding aside I’m good friends with Neil and Quincy, I think it’s a great way for CBS to get a lot of scale very quickly…I envy Quincy because he operates under different economic conditions than I do…I work for GE, I couldn’t have gotten that deal through.

“Why can’t we all just get along?”

As if anyone has been clamoring for the lost episodes of the Gilmore Girls, Warner Brothers announced today that they will launch two of their own video portals. TheWB.com and KidsWB.com. The press release cited Mattel, McDonald’s and Johnson & Johnson as marketing partners, but wasn’t specific as to which (or both) properties.

My question - Why? Hulu is already doing some heavy lifting and creating the non-YouTube destination for high quality, licensed content from TV. Why not join in the fun, creating a bigger, better Hulu with even more of your favorite content? The release also cites multiple partners for multi-platform syndication including Comcast Cable, Fancast.com, AOL, a number of mobile carriers, and an application on Facebook for integration of Facebook’s social utility on TheWB.com, and TheWB.com’s entertainment content on Facebook. Clearly they are up for sharing their content.

The complaint I hear most (although seriously doubt its validity) is that people don’t know what stations their favorite programs are on. If you miss an episode of 30 Rock, they claim not to know to check NBC.com. But I can’t fathom that having a new URL/destination site that is named after a channel that no longer exists is going to help the matter. Glad I’m not jonesing for some Dawson’s Creek reruns. (please note the deep sarcasm) Seems like some major media companies will remain content with a fragmented media landscape.

Lots of news worthy of discussion this past weekend which I mostly caught via Google Reader on my Blackberry while traveling back and forth between Boston and New York. Some thoughts:

- Sony will again attempt to deliver video to the PS3. The new Playstation store will offer among a digital media download service with original content. Despite past failures with Movielink and Sony Connect, the move is a no-brainer.

While Sony faces an uphill battle in trying to compete with the already strong force that is Microsoft’s xBox live marketplace, their media presence should give them a leg up in programming and it’s a market they should have a share of.

It will be particularly interesting to see how original content plays in. The playstation store is a natural outlet for content on Crackle and Sony Pictures Television has made a number of investments in original digital entertainment.

- A Vuze study shows prevalence of bandwidth throttling - The study involved more than 8,000 users who installed a plugin that tracked packet-loss. While Vuze admits that the sample size is not statistically significant, they state : “we are not aware of any normal conditions that would cause the disproportionately large variances in reset activity shown in the data of data sets of this size.”

- Revision3 Inks Deals with Hulu, Joost - While the list of syndication partners continues to grow their largest audience is still on YouTube. It begs the question at what point do new media studios like Revision3 begin using YouTube more as a promotional tool to drive viewers to sites like Hulu where they will receive better ad rates.

- Funny or Die Celebrated 4/20 in (anonymous) style a few days after their one year anniversary with Cocoa Rice Crispies, reruns of 90210 and FOD videos including PSI (Pot Scene Investigation.) The site currently reaches 3.2 million uniques a month and a redesign is coming this week.

Yes, thats vague. But I could tell you that my weekend pick was Matzah and gefilte fish, but thats not what I’m looking forward to at all.

Over the past week, I’ve spoken with reps from a number of the major video aggregators and streaming providers about their recommended settings for outputting video from the web to TV. I also purchased a monthly subscription to the MLB.TV Premium Package for their 1.2MB stream. I’ll be tweaking my video card and TV and starting OVW’s own convergence video shootout.

Beyond the novelty factor, what online video can really replicate - or even hold its own - against a TV offering? On my previous experiments, I’d been using an s-video output into a regular CRT display. Now we’ve added DVI/HDMI outputs to the mix, and a 1080p plasma TV to the mix, which may not be as forgiving. We’ll just have to see.

We’ve yet to decide if we’ll do a comprehensive comparison, or share our thoughts on a rolling basis, but I’m looking forward to Arrested Development on Hulu, a few movies on Netflix’s Watch Now, and maybe Veoh’s most popular content, Star Trek (ok, maybe less so for the Star Trek, but I’m sure I’ll find something to enjoy). I’ve had some issues with Microsoft’s Silverlight player with my previous MLB experiments, but I’m hoping they’ve worked through them. Do the TV networks have a leg up when the screen you watch on is a TV? My sofa and I look forward to finding out…..just as soon as we’re done with our Seder.

Not that YouTube and Hulu didn’t already want you sending their content everywhere, but it doesn’t heart to make it simpler. Both sites recently rolled out features that automate syndication of content to social networking and bookmarking sites, streamlining the process of sharing with friends.

Hulu offers sharing links for eight sites and has enabled support for viewing clips within RSS feeds. YouTube has taken their community portion a step further, displaying related commentary such as video responses and blog trackbacks directly below videos and personalizing sharing preferences based on usage “so if you Digg more often than you Facebook, Digg will show up instead.”

Not that any of this news is particularly groundbreaking, but it will doubtless lead to more widespread distribution of those sites content. Expect to start seeing more Hulu and YouTube videos in your Facebook news feed in the weeks to come.