In the war between video sites, Hulu might have the Daily Show, 30 Rock and 24, but YouTube just signed big studio deals to bring you... Harper's Island and The Addams Family. Oh, Google.

From New York to Los Angeles, Viacom channels like Comedy Central are set to flicker off cable systems in the first minute of 2009. Sumner Redstone's desperation finally impacted your life!

We've uncovered what's really killing the online-advertising business: Sarah Palin! Or rather, the lack thereof. Traffic at Hulu, NBC's YouTube wannabe, tumbled in November without the Web's favorite hot lady governor and VP candidate.

You've never heard of media analyst company Screen Digest. Keep that in mind when you stumble upon a few dozen news reports today that claim "Hulu ... a smaller upstart backed by News Corporation and NBC Universal ... is forecast to draw level with Google’s YouTube in US advertising revenues next year." Any reporter who reads that sentence in the Financial Times instantly wonders, "forecast by who?" By the Financial Times? By Hulu executives? No, by Screen Digest. Take that as you will.

Jason Kilar, the CEO of online-video site Hulu, has rediscovered a truism: less is more. Hulu, which is mostly owned by NBC and News Corp., runs fewer ads on the TV clips it licenses from its TV-network parents than they air when they broadcast the same shows. And yet the ads are more effective. This could simply be a novelty effect; everything about Hulu is new, so the ads also draw more notice. But Hulu may be onto something. Why don't networks try running fewer ads on air, too? (Photo via Alarm:Clock)

The name should perhaps be changed to Saturday Night Streamed, suggests the Times' Brian Stelter, and he kinda has a point: The most memorable SNL sketches of the season were likely seen by more people online than on broadcast television. Tina Fey's debut impersonation of Sarah Palin was viewed 14 million times on Hulu.com, compared with 10 million people estimated to have seen it on TV. Numbers for her follow-up impersonation were similarly lopsided. We love the way NBC has used Hulu, but the whole thing looks like a trap.

Oh happy day! 30 Rock, Tina Fey's funniest-show-on-TV backstage screwball fest, isn't scheduled to premiere until next week. But, because sometimes the internet is a wondrous and giving technodiety, the season opener is now available on Hulu! (Thank you New York Observer, for pointing this out to us!) Now some of you delayed-gratification crazies out there may want to wait until next week, but I say poo to that. If the bowl's in front of you, you gotta smoke it. So we've embedded the episode after the jump. Enjoy. Nick, I'm... um, taking lunch.

Click to viewBoomTown's Kara Swisher paused in making ribald jokes about Joost's London office to report that the online-video purveyor will be offering six full seasons of NBC's former hit Friends. With this, Joost will reach an audience who prefers New York City when there's no black people, just like in dated sitcoms and Woody Allen movies. But I digress. NBC-backed Hulu only offers snippets of Friends episodes. Joost isn't exactly going to take off with syndicated reruns you can watch on dozens of cable channels. For those of you desperate to relive Ross and Rachel, the site will relaunch in mid-October — no plugin required.

What's the best way to get people who don't watch TV to start watching it? For starters, advertising TV shows somewhere other than on TV. Give NBC this much credit: The network, which has seen better days in the ratings, hopes to attract viewers by releasing fall season premieres on Hulu a week ahead of their television air date.Networks have been experimenting with early releases online for some time now as a way to counteract modern viewing habits such as skipping past all the network promos with a TiVo. But just a couple of weeks ago, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker was telling us all that by not airing Olympic events live or letting viewers watch them online, the network was creating "excitement" via "word of mouth" by withholding the opening ceremonies. Then again, the opening ceremonies in Beijing were actually interesting. The third-place network is correctly guessing that there's no way anybody is going to be eagerly anticipating the new season of Knight Rider — which is going to need all the help it can get.

Nielsen stats show NBC's Hulu video site has only 2 percent of YouTube's traffic. But there's a twist: Hulu runs ads on everything. YouTube, by contrast, can sell ads on less than 3 percent of its video trove. Moreover, Hulu seems to land more big-ad-budget consumer brands like Dove. Watch enough Hulu, and the ads seem pretty close to what you'll catch on cable. Maybe that's why they aggravate my elitist nerves. I'd still rather pay a few bucks a month to watch all my online vids without interruptions. Yes, I'd pay for YouTube. Is it really just me?

Click to viewFinally a widget I can get behind: TV and movie site Hulu has built a set of highly configurable widgets that can preview or even play full episodes in the middle of a Web page. Now if only they'd carry the entire Season 4 backlog of Battlestar Galactica.

When NBC Universal jumped into bed with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. to launch YouTube-competitor Hulu, you just knew things were going to get tawdry. Murdoch, after all, has shrewdly and repeatedly exploited the draw of sexual content, at UK newspaper The Sun (with its page three girls), on TV network Fox and elsewhere. And so perhaps it should have been clear from the get-go what Murdoch's number two Peter Chernin was wrong when he declared that Hulu was going to be "a game changer for Internet video... for the first time, consumers will get what they want." Actually, Hulu is bootstrapping itself the same way the entire rest of the internet did: via porn!

Every print publisher, and especially the glossies, want in on the online-video game. Unlike the text-and-photos Web, where there are more pageviews than media buyers know what to do with, there's not enough slickly packaged content that big brands deem safe enough to advertise themselves on. Condé Nast's Vogue has a new reality show for the Web, Model.Live, which "tracks three models as they navigate casting calls, catwalks and airports for fashion weeks in New York, London, Milan and Paris." It debuts August 19. What you won't see? Drinking and smoking. What you will see? Eating disorders confronted "head-on." That's because this an attempt to reach out to a younger demographic on behalf of the sponsor, aspirational mall brand Express — which sells American women the sequined, screen-printed jeans they love. What's all this going to cost Express?

But the online percentage of that upfront spend has been slow to rise over the few years since YouTube was still being incubated at Sequoia, and remains in the single digits while the advertising industry is bracing for a downturn. At a certain point, VCs will come to their senses and stop subsidizing the bandwidth that makes these sites possible, while cable and network sites and startups like Hulu, with the copyright permissions and the content that sponsors love, will continue to outpace any revenue garnered from user-generated content — which one study estimates will account for only 4 percent of the industry's already paltry online video revenues.

Mark Cuban says Hulu is kicking ass because of a simple marketing device: The NBC and News Corp.-backed site is advertising full-length programs on YouTube to get traffic to shows on which they can sell real advertising. YouTube, rather than ban Hulu, is now angling to keep that traffic in-house by allowing partners to upload shows up to 1 gigabyte in size, enough room for full-length film and television programming (though not at great quality).

Two years ago, Mark Cuban wrote: "Would Google be crazy to buy YouTube? No doubt about it. Moronic would be an understatement of a lifetime." Since then, Google did buy it — for $1.65 billion — and the site's become so popular its actually the Web's third most popular search engine all on its own. Does that mean Cuban has changed his mind? No, no, it does not. The reason is Hulu, Cuban explains in 802 words, which we've edited down to 100, below.

Hulu — the NBC-Universal/Fox owned video website that is not so different from the numerous other websites offering full episodes of television shows, is the subject of a fawning, incredulous profile in today's Los Angeles Times. While all of the major networks already offer the bulk of their primetime line-ups for free online, Hulu boldly puts a bunch of it together on one site, thereby saving precious seconds of web surfing time. In an embarrassing display of old media-ness, reporter Scott Collins rhapsodizes over Hulu's "special features."

Now showing on NBC Universal and News Corp. Web video joint venture Hulu: the Daily Show's Jon Stewart and the Colbert Report's Stephen Colbert from Comedy Central. Viacom, which owns the Comedy Central network, has long hinted it might join Hulu — we heard rumors the deal was done in March — but until now had only announced agreements with Joost, the failing Internet video company founded by Skype founders Nikolas Zennstrom and Janus Friis.

ABC has the most popular television network website, just a shade more popular than NBC.com among the six broadcasters sampled by HitWise. But both websites are down in their relative share of the online audience, while CBS has greatly increased visits. Why? Well, for starters, CBS is ahead in the year-to-date ratings race for actual television. The top draws to the network sites are, once again, competitions and other game shows — American Idol was the top draw for Fox, Deal or No Deal for NBC and Dancing With the Stars for ABC. Almost every site, however, kept users on longer, with the average user spending three more minutes on CBS. Only visits to NBC got shorter, probably because some users are going to Hulu to watch full episodes of shows like The Office and 30 Rock

Michael Jordan, former CEO of CBS, has been tapped by Redlasso as an advisor, presumably to glad-hand the TV companies which sent the company a cease and desist letter last week. The startup has cobbled together a fair-use defense; the Electronic Frontier Foundation told Valleywag they're watching the case but declined to weigh in. But if Redlasso were going to fight the networks in court, it would have hired lawyers, not a dealmaker like Jordan. The company has been in talks with the networks for years. So what went wrong? Hulu.