Beats me but the joint venture that is Hulu (owned by News Corp, NBC-Universal and The Walt Disney Company), aims to find out.  Users will pay $9.99/month and get to watch advertising. (On the other hand, cable subscribers and other pay-TV subscribers have been doing that for decades, so maybe this Hulu Plus thingie is just, well, a repackaging of an old idea?)

Maybe, maybe not.  For  $9.99/month and you can get entire seasons worth of current shows as well as back-catalog or shows which left the airwaves years ago. (The existing free product typically has the most recently aired show plus a few trailing episodes.)  Users will also get to watch content in 720p HD on PCs and Macs, iPads,  iPhones, a Samsung Internet-connected TV, Samsung BluRay players, and in the future, Sony PlayStation and Microsoft XBox gaming consoles. (Presumably here will be even more devices in the future).

Hulu CEO Jason Kilar described Hulu Plus as a  “revolutionary ad-supported subscription product,”  in this blog post.

Well, we’ll see if the magic translates into revenue and how the cable world’s “TV Everywhere” efforts stack up against Hulu Plus.

At the root of this challenge is something that sounds fairly prosaic but is fraught with complexities and that is how a movie or episode of a TV series (or the entire series) is identified.

This announcement between CBS and Secure Path Technology, Inc.is an example of a couple of entities taking concrete steps to overcome the challenges associated registering and licensing content at time when incumbent distribution models are under siege by various Internet-based offerings.  As consumers increasingly program their own content experiences, demanding it on their schedule and on the devices they want, online service providers and media companies are going to struggle to keep up with the demands of the marketplace if they don’t make the investments in metadata systems and common content identifiers.

Beyond the very important requirements for automation of licensing and calculating royalties, prioritizing investments in metadata management and content identification standards will pay off for media companies in another important area: recommendation and discovery systems.  Why? The more consistent the metadata fields are across media sectors e.g. music or movies, recommendation and discovery technologies engines can be more rapidly deployed – if they’re developers aren’t having to spend time building up metadata fields.

At their core, deals such as the one between Secure Path and CBS are about efficiencies that need to be developed behind the walls of media companies. Look for more, lots more of these kinds of announcements.

Well, there’s what we will pay for as consumers and what the movie studios are willing to deliver. As always, there’s a price.

Now, the FCC has approved a proposal by the movie studios which would deliver the new distribution strategy that would enable consumers to pay a fee to get a hi-definition stream of movies that are still in the theaters or just out of theaters. (This would be a distribution window that be slotted in ahead of the so-called “home product” windows of DVDs for sale, rental DVDs, online distribution.)  The market calculus is pretty simple: if we’re not getting consumers in the theater, and DVD sales are slipping, and online piracy is a constant, existential threat, then perhaps a “rental” in the form of a tethered stream (encrypted stream with decryption being done by a STB or the consumer’s computer) is the way to go?

Predictably, the studios’ position that in order to deliver this potentially cool benefit, they want protection of the streams. Their answer? The “selective output control feature” they want built into new HD TVs. This technology would prevent a consumer from hooking up an analog recording device or to otherwise redirect the unencrypted stream of content from the computer or STB to the consumer’s TV set.

While the FCC is embarking a new era – pushing network providers to adhere to “net neutrality” like principles, freeing up unused or under-utilized spectrum as part of a national broadband strategy – some of the old tensions remain. Such as the how much control content companies should have over the technology consumers use to access and consume copyrighted material.

Me, I think the FCC needs to continue to focus on maximizing the value of a natural resource – spectrum – and ensuring equal access to the ‘net for all – not dictating consumer-device specifications.

Apparently the reason is that Comedy Central and Hulu couldn’t agree on a revenue split of advertising generated on Hulu. So Comedy Central figured it would really rather online consumers view the shows on their respective Comedy Central sites.

Between this development and the rumors about a pay wall being implemented at Hulu (here and here, among others), one has to wonder if the experiment of inter-network cooperation on neutral-ground Hulu is now complete. It would appear that especially in tough times, and with precious advertising dollars always at stake, the licensing negotiations for content is still the immovable object to the irresistible force of large online audience numbers. What will be interesting is how online consumers who have grown accustomed to “The Daily Show” or “Colbert Report” via Hulu rise up in protest and flood Viacom with complaints or will they merely change their browser bookmarks or feeds? Will they go to iTunes? Netflix?

Walmart’s the latest entrant in the over-the-top sweepstakes and it could be one of those deals that will be viewed in the future as an important example of my colleague Andrew Frank’s “IP-Dominant-Gene Theory” that applies to all things media.

By acquiring VUDU, Walmart positions itself to be an important intermediary between content providers and consumers who are looking for IP-dominant service offerings which give them the ability to tailor their content experiences.

If any entity is going to be responsible for enabling mainstream consumers to embrace online content offerings, it could be Walmart.  For Walmart VUDU is most certainly about the potential for extending its brand relationship to online consumers while also leveraging its CE-device retail partners. If the company can integrate these two areas to create device-service offerings such as Blu-ray players or connected TVs running VUDU’s software, Walmart could have a significant solution that would attract the attention (not all of it good) of telco and cable service providers. It will be interesting to see how the cable companies, in particular, react to this deal.

And the acquisition puts Walmart in the middle of the same emerging market as Apple with its AppleTV/iTunes combo, a raft of of over-the-top boxes such as Roku and the reportedly-soon-to-be-shipping Boxee box, not to mention the XBox and Playstation consoles which boast their own movie and TV show delivery services.

One other reason this deal is good for Walmart? VUDU is coming at a price point that “. . . is not material” to Walmart’s first-quarter earnings. (Of course, when you remember that Walmart’s annual revenue is around $400 billion, it would have to buy the state of California to have a material impact on its earnings.) So, sounds like they got, for them, a reasonable deal on VUDU. (Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, according to a press release issued by Walmart. VUDU will operate as a subsidiary with the expected close of the deal in a few weeks.)

OK, maybe Apple would have kept Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, on Apple’s board if Google’s tech-hegemony had stopped with Android. Maybe, maybe even the Chrome browser might have been acceptable.

But a streaming rental movie business?

AppleTV might only be a “hobby” Apple continues to invest in (as Tim Cook, Apple president/COO, said during a recent earnings call) but it’s a really important “hobby” with significant long-term potential.

Short answers: Perhaps and unlikely.

This tells us the Beatles, MTV and Rock band are going to punch parts of the Beatles storied catalog into the digital age via video games. MTV’s RockBand unit, including Harmonix (which makes the actual gear) are going to release “The Beatles: Rock Band” on 9/9/09. (I can only guess that this is a play on “Revolution 9” from The White Album.) The new game will be available on Xbox 360, PLAYSTATION 3 and Wii consoles. 

When I was a kid in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s (that’s 1960s and 1970s), one of the adolescent litmus tests for any new set of social engagements was were you a Beatles person or a Stones person. (Queen vs. Rush? Please.) I suppose now the litmus test will be “what’d you score on ‘Across the Universe?’ “

In other news here (WSJ, subscription required), Universal Music and YouTube are apparently hammering out a deal, or trying to anyhow, to create a channel for premium music videos.  The hope is that premium video from rightsholders like Universal could mean premium ad dollars. Perhaps.  In the WSJ story, Google CEO Eric Schmidt muses that something like an “iTunes” for music videos is needed. I dunno. Music videos started out as promotional fodder; accounted for in the same cost lines as travel, hotel-room damages and “flowers and favors” and it seems as if consumers value them about at about the same level.

To be sure, I think Schmidt was invoking iTunes’ “experience” value to consumers, not as a pure transaction storefront.

There might be something to this approach in as much as we also saw last week an announcement from BayTSP in which five major studios signed on to use BayTSP’s Content Authentication Platform to identify copyrighted content on UGC and video sites. BayTSP’s system includes metrics for tracking viewership to enable serving advertisements against the videos.

Just like birds got to fly and fish got to swim, rightsholders have both a need and requirements to enforce copyright, so the MySpace and BayTSP announcements don’t mean that we’ll never again see another lawsuit against a site for contributory infringement, nor will it mean the end of sites being hit with notice-takedowns. 

Instead, these announcements point to the realization by some media companies that monetizing certain behaviors is a whole lot easier than trying to engage in behavior modification on a massive scale.