The Buzz

I recently pointed to a sampling that showed the difference in content between Hulu and Hulu Plus, but it turns out the examples were a bit too selective.

A more broad study shows that, at this early stage, 88 percent of the content on Hulu Plus is available on the free Hulu.com. To be fair, that does equate to more than 3,000 TV episodes. But the study found that if you then compare to Netflix, much of the Hulu Plus content is available commercial free on Netflix.

There’s definitely exceptions, but it appears Hulu has some work to do to bring its library to parity with Netflix, who has been aggressively locking down deals lately, let alone exceed it to be charging more and require ads, as opposed to Netflix which is commercial-free.

Meanwhile, an enterprising soul tried to put together an infographic.  Hulu Plus acquits itself well here, but some obvious changes have already occurred, such as the widespread availability of Family Guy on Netflix, which would therefore beat Hulu Plus.  Still, it helps illustrate the differences.  See the infographic after the jump:

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Do you like using Google to search? How about their YouTube product for watching videos?

Then I bet you’ll love watching a video about Google searches, right?

Well, maybe not. Google’s dabbling into the content creation game by launching a 90-second weekly video called Google Beat, hosted by a member of their PR department who discusses some of the biggest search trends of the week.

Given the video is a woman standing in a sparsely decorated room with white walls, the production values are solid. Still, given Google’s news connections, they could do more to mix in video clips or photos illustrating the trends they’re talking about. They have an opportunity to leverage their own data to produce an informative and entertaining program. What they have is a great start, but it left this viewer yearning more. Check out the first edition after the jump: (more…)

In an effort to try to right the rental ship, Blockbuster may file for bankruptcy next month. Hopefully this strategy works better than it did for Movie Gallery, who spent years restructuring, only to ultimately liquidate. Blockbuster anticipates closing at least 500 of its more than 3,000 stores as part of the restructuring, after already closing roughly 1,000 last year.

SOURCE: Los Angeles Times via Gizmodo

Digg finally unwrapped its new iteration, version 4, to the masses, but it wasn’t without hitches. Some bugs, combined with heavier than normal traffic, caused the site to struggle with the initial load. It seems to be doing better now, but for awhile, some users came across the “Fail Ox.”

Playing off the famous “Fail Whale” and invoking memories of the classic game “Oregon Trail” that many 20-somethings played on old Apple ][ machines in grade school, the “fail ox” popped up when the site was unable to load a page. The instances of the graphic showing up have fallen off, but it’s a clever nod during a period of growing pains, and comes up most often when trying to use Digg search (I just triggered it while writing this post).

Meanwhile, the new version is pretty sweet. I’ve been playing with it since the early beta invites went out and found a lot to like. Social networking imports allow you to find friends on the network so you can follow their stories, and you can follow news sources too, effectively creating a sort of RSS reader mixed with social networking from your friends. Certainly it’ll become more useful as more people you know or trust get on the service, but it definitely looks promising, and I’ve been on Digg more in the past month than I have in years.

SOURCE: TechCrunch

Hey iPhone users, if you have a Netflix subscription and some downtime, you can rejoice: you can now access the Netflix streaming catalog on your iPhone. Previously, only iPad users had that luxury.

The app is free, but requires a subscription of $8.99 a month or higher (same as the requirement for streaming on other devices). One cool feature extended to the iPhone: you can stop watching on one device and pick up the content on another device where you left off.

No doubt, this is one way Netflix is aiming to stay ahead of Hulu and their new subscription service.

At our sister paper in Houston, Dwight Silverman pointed to an item that asks the logical follow-up question: how much data does streaming Netflix utilize? Some rough math done by Clicker says you can watch roughly 13 hours before hitting the 2 GB data cap; the data, which they roughly determined was 2.5MB a minute, is hard to recommend for those on the 200MB plan, given a few TV shows could easily push a user over the limit.

SOURCES: CNet News.com, Clicker via Houston Chronicle TechBlog

Google is most famous for two in-house products, its search and AdSense products, but they’ve acquired a lot of talent and technology along the way to both bolster those two core products, but add a lot of other possibilities along the way.

In fact, the sheer volume of them makes it easy to forget just how many acquisitions they’ve made over the years. That AdSense stuff really does pay a lot out! Check out a great graphic made by the team-up of scores.org and jess.net, after the jump. (more…)

Search engines are great for finding out data, but they can lag when breaking news happens. After all, they have to index data before they can actually provide results to it.

Google has released its attempt into the wild, an area that other search engines, like Bing, have been dabbling in for awhile, and even Google has tested within its regular results for months. Their real-time search mines social networking like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and its own Google Buzz to find fresher content than the search engines can normally provide. They’re rolling it out to users slowly, but if you have it, you’ll see an “Updates” option on the search results page.

Doing a little research on a historical figure won’t gain any benefits, but when breaking news happens, it may offer a faster way to learn about what’s going on.

SOURCE: CNet news.com

Now that the beta for Hulu Plus is live and charging people for access to more video, what does that mean for your $10 per month, at least for now? It means you can get more shows, but more importantly more episodes of existing shows.

A research firm pulled the data together into a nice graph, but given they chose only the three major nets available on Hulu, and only six of each show, it’s not fully representative, but does offer some good examples:

There’s a few instances here of shows being available that aren’t on the standard Hulu, like 8 Simple Rules and a boatload of My Name is Earl and Law and Order. In many cases, an entire season becomes available; in less frequent cases, entire series (or at the least, multiple seasons) become available.

Given that this is just the beta, it can be assumed that more deals are in the works to expand the offerings further. This isn’t a bad start, but given Netflix streaming offers access to commercial free shows for a dollar less a month, selection will be a key difference, and one many will watch closely.

Hulu seems to be focusing on the current seasons, where DVDs may not be available, and where people would be more likely to pay since they don’t own it. To that end, they’re making a good move, but whether people will pay $10 a month for ad-supported streaming remains to be seen.  Add to that Apple’s possible entry into the game, and we’ve got quite a lot of choices suddenly popping up/

SOURCE: Business Insider via Gizmodo