Fire Phasers, Mr. Hulu!

For those of you who actually pay attention to the TWSS news segments, you may remember Ian and I talking about how Fox and NBC were teaming up to create a YouTube-like video streaming service that would both allow on-demand streaming of popular shows as well as allow other services access to distribute the videos themselves.  Well, let's let the good people at Adweek.com explain how this thing workds:

"When it does launch, the site will allow fans to stream episodes of NBC series such as The Office and Friday Night Lights, along with the soon-to-launch remake of The Bionic Woman. Meanwhile, Fox is planning to offer on-demand episodes of staples like The Simpsons and Mad TV as well as premiering shows such as the New Orleans-set cop drama K-Ville. In addition to Hulu.com, the sweeping venture will see these series distributed across the biggest sites on the Web, including AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo!."

Well, low and behold, the thing is finally almost ready to launch sometime in October.  The name of the new site? HULU.com.  Yep.  Hulu.

Why Hulu, for the love of god?  To quote the CEO of the new venture:

"Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce and rhymes with itself," he wrote. "Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we're building. Our hope is that Hulu will embody our (admittedly ambitious) never-ending mission, which is to help you find and enjoy the world's premiere content when, where and how you want it."

Ooooooh-kay. 

In any event, if you'd like to try and beta-test the new website, head on over to hulu.com and leave your e-mail address.  You just might get lucky.