The future of entertainment is on-line; at least many of us who use the internet believe this to be true. Now, whether that is downloading the video and then watching on your computer or iPod, or if it is streaming the video to your computer via a website or a program like Joost; seems to be a matter of debate. Apple has been leading the charge for the past few years, enjoying a great deal of success with music and to a lesser extent with video.
Over the past 12 months you may have heard that the music publishers and the major studios have started to experiment with options other than iTunes. It seems the over riding reasons have been less to do with meeting customer needs and demands, and more with keeping control of their products through the entire life cycle. To date no one has really been very successful in going up against the iTunes store; except maybe Amazon, but they already know on-line retailing.
Earlier this week NBC Universal released a beta of their new service Hulu. It is designed to be an iTunes killer. I can't tell you much about it as I am still waiting to get an invite so that I can log on and take a tour. MacRumors was able to get an invite and showed off an interesting aspect of Hulu, the ability to embed video in a blog or web-page. You-tube and other services allow this, but this should be the very first time a major company offered such a service for copy righted materials.
Below is a full length episode of The Office. Check it out, pretty interesting. For TV episodes I'm not sure how useful this is; but apparently you can edit down to clips as well. One thing I know, you can't do this with iTunes.