Hulu's sharing tools, TV shows help it win online video fans
By Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY 10-29-08

LOS ANGELES — Hulu CEO Jason Kilar could give you a whole list of reasons his "premium" video site has seen such stunning growth, but the sharing tools would have to top it.

The Hulu service launched just a year ago and is the sixth-most-viewed online video channel, bypassing more established sites Veoh, Joost and Fancast, according to market tracker Nielsen Online.

Monthly traffic figures are few, since Hulu has been around for such a short time. But the service
showed nearly 150 million video streams in September, over one-third more than August's 107 million streams, according to Nielsen.

While that's a fraction of YouTube's 5.3 billion September video streams, Hulu clearly is onto something.

Kilar increased Hulu's visibility by cutting deals with big distributors such as Yahoo, MySpace and MSN. Fans can watch one of over 1,000 TV shows or movies, mostly from the Fox and NBC libraries, along with a handful of cable channels, including Comedy Central.

Two big omissions: CBS and ABC.

Kilar says he hopes to come to terms with both networks, which have deals with competing video services including Veoh, Fancast and AOL. In the meantime, he's made it easy for Hulu users to find those shows by adding links to CBS and ABC shows in Hulu searches.

NBC Universal and Fox parent News Corp. (NWS) formed Hulu in reaction to the unauthorized appearance on YouTube of clips fromFamily Guy and other shows, as fans posted clips from homemade recordings.

Dan Fawcett, president of Fox's digital media division, says Fox and NBC were "surprised" by Hulu's rapid growth. He says Fox anticipated that by now Hulu would be spending money on marketing, but that hasn't been needed. "It's all been via word of mouth."

'Lights' stays brilliant despite downsizin

By Robert Bianco, USA TODAY

In tough times, you just have to make do with what you have.

For the small town of Dillon, Texas, that entails dealing with a high school budget that has no money for books but a surplus for a scoreboard. And for fans of NBC's Friday Night Lights, that entails putting up with a deal that sends the show to DirecTV's 101 Network for a 13-episode fall run, to be followed, we're told, by an NBC run in January.

No, it's hardly ideal, particularly considering how few people will get the show in its first go-round. But without the deal, there'd be no Lights on at all, and that would be far worse.

This is, to be sure, a cut-down version of Lights, starting with that episode order. Roles have been reduced, and the show as a whole seems less populated — and a less true re-creation of small-town life.

On the upside, the stories in the first two episodes are a major improvement from last fall, as the show refocuses on the town and its team. (That's a particular blessing for Adrianne Palicki and Jesse Plemons, two wonderful actors who were trapped in the show's least-wonderful plot.) And with Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton in place on top, the cast as a whole remains strong.

There's no denying that the show looks a little worn, a victim perhaps of budget pressures that may have moved the series from cost-efficient to cheap. But even a reduced Lights is better than most TV series, and a reduced Lights was all we were going to get.

We'll just have to make the best of it.

Copyright 2008 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.