Hulu ads are twice as effective as television ads and part of the reason for this is that the online video site gives viewers quite a bit of control over their video ad experience. They’ve asked viewers to let them know whether ads are relevant for them, have let viewers select the type of ad they’d like to see and now they’ve launched a new ad innovation—Hulu Ad Swap.
The average web video viewer watched 18 hours of content during the month of August, with YouTube and Hulu drawing the highest engagement at 5.7 hours and 3.2 hours, respectively. Another interesting statistic is that 85.8 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
Canadians will not only have movies, but the new service includes features common to most modern DVDs such as behind the scenes videos, cast interviews and blooper reels (my favorite). YouTube will also offer parodies and remixes, a longtime popular offering at the video portal.
Yahoo’s original video programming is a part of that success. Variety reports, the company claims nearly all of the top 10 most-watched original series online like “Primetime in No Time,” a highlight reel of TV’s most memorable moments from the previous night.
The platform is only available on iPad. However, in a few weeks, there will be an iPhone version that can be used on an iPod Touch as well.
According to a new Beet.TV interview with Kevin McGurn, VP of Sales for Hulu, Hulu is blowing television advertising out of the water. McGurn says that advertisers on Hulu are seeing double the return, compared to the ad load on television.
Vizio, best known for their reasonably priced LCD TVs, entered the Android tablet market this summer with a sub-$300 producct, the WiFi-only Vizio 8. It has an 8-inch 1024×768 pixel capacitive touch screen, 4GB of internal storage with the option to add up to 32MB using a Micro SD card, and a front-facing VGA (640×480 pixels) camera. It runs Google’s Android OS 2.3 (Gingerbread) designed primarly for phones and not tablets. While it might be behind the times with its hardware specs and OS choice, it has one advantage over other tablets. It is the first to be able to stream Hulu Plus video.
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Walmart has worked its way up to become one of the largest online movie businesses in the U.S. The retailer surpassed time-honored companies like Amazon and Sony, and even fired a direct hit at the top seller of movies, Apple’s iTunes store.
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Hulu is about to have some very cranky viewers on their hands as Fox has made the decision to pull next-day access to their series on the video streaming site, enforcing a new 8-day waiting period.
It looks like things are finally starting to look up for the international online video crowd—Hulu has announced that they are finally going abroad, starting with a launch in Japan later this year.
