Hulu’s corporate masters have reared their dragon heads from time to time in the past, like when it nuked Boxee and PS3 access, so you couldn’t watch Hulu on your actual TV, and made it even harder to watch Hulu outside of the US.

Now, Hulu’s blocking startup video discovery sites like Rippol, Yidio and Clicker from embedding its videos. Likely, again, because Hulu’s content providers aren’t too happy about somebody throwing all of that content into a single place that’s not Hulu, even though theoretically, embedding is harmless – the video goods aren’t being stolen, and Hulu still makes money off of the ads in the stream. I mean, we’re talking about embedding here. This is about control.

And, given that Rupert Murdoch is publicly entertaining the idea of de-listing all of News Corp’s content from Google (with Microsoft offering its own cash incentive to do so), a Hulu you have to pay for, or at least, is even more tightly controlled is more feasible than we’d like to think. (Hulu is a joint venture between Murdoch’s News Corp (which owns Fox), NBC Universal and Disney (which owns ABC).

Ads, those I can deal with. Alec Baldwin’s genius isn’t free. Arbitrary restrictions that make it harder to watch what I want to – that, not so much. I’d rather watch nothing at all. I’m pretty lazy, after all. I can’t even muster the energy to figure out when a TV show actually airs. (When does 30 Rock or Dexter run? I don’t know.)

The way Hulu’s going, it looks like I’m going to have a lot more time to play Modern Warfare 2. You know, TV dudes, the biggest entertainment event in history. The kind of thing that’s pulling people away from their TVs, ripping their eyeballs away from the ads you sell to survive. [GigaOm]

The New York Observer reports that the company formed by publishing’s Superfriends – perhaps Legion of Doom is more appropriate – will format and publish rags that “work across multiple digital platforms, whether the iPhone, the BlackBerry or countless other digital devices”, though they’re not developing their own reader hardware.

Which is where it gets a little sticky, says one of the Observer’s sources: “The really, really hard part is that you’ve got so many different kinds of devices running on different operating systems. And how do you handle that? The consortium provides one point of contact for the consumer. When you come to the main store, you can get the content any way you want.”

In one sense, the venture will be very much like Hulu – a separate company from the publishers, run by Time’s John Squires, who’s been behind the whole initiative, as All Things D originally reported. It’s like Hulu for another reason, in that it’s more like a disjointed confederation whose motto is hanging together or hanging separately since every publisher clearly rolling their own, separate gambit as well: We’ve got the tabletised version of Wired (Conde); Hearst was planning its very own ereader at one point; and Time too.

It feels like the early, disjointed days of digital music, at best. There’s a good chance stuff you buy now (well, soon) isn’t going to work forever. Time’s thing. Maybe Apple’s thing. Some kind of Adobe formatted thing. Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s thing. One of them will stick and we’ll have our digital magazines preserving an old print format in a digital way – hey, the publishing industry might even save itself – but I’m just going to cower in a corner with free stuff in my web browser until this all gets sorted out. [Observer]

Apparently, Myka goes beyond Hulu and Boxee allowing you to “browse to any web site and play video content directly onto your TV”. So there appears to be some sort of web browsing feature on this, although it seems like they left BitTorrent out of this one lest they cannibalise their original Myka player. The ION is available now for $US379 (Wireless-N and Blu-ray add on brings it to $US644). But why would you spend nearly $US400 on something that only does part of what a PC can do, when you can buy an actual, compact HTPC for less money?

Want Boxee and Hulu to play in high-def on your TV? Meet Myka ION

LINCOLN, Mass., Nov. 5, 2009 — Myka, makers of the magic box that downloads and streams high-definition videos onto your TV, is introducing the Myka ION — the first Web-to-TV product that can easily run Boxee, Hulu and other leading Internet video services.

Myka ION is powered by the Intel Atom Processor 330 and NVIDIA ION Graphics Processor, giving Myka ION fast media-player performance at a low cost.

Myka ION lets you browse to any Web site and play video content directly onto your TV — bypassing your PC entirely. No messing with conversion software, no tinkering with anything. Plug it in and it starts working right away.

“Technology has finally caught up with what consumers want out of Internet video services,” said Myka President Dan Lovy. “They want to be freed from their computers and watch the growing variety of Web video content on their large-screen, high-definition living room TVs. And they want to do it without a lot of hassle and without video quality suffering.

“We’ve heard them loud and clear and we’re proud to present the Myka ION, the first product to take advantage of the latest processor technology and finally give Web video consumers what they want.”

The Intel and NVIDIA processors do all the heavy lifting, such as video encoding/decoding during playback, resulting in seamless, high-quality content beamed directly to your TV. The Myka ION is actually a mini-PC in itself.

With the Myka ION, you don’t need to do any work to figure out how to get a downloaded video to actually play on your TV. With a wide range of file formats supported, you don’t need to think about it at all. Just plug it in and enjoy.

[Myka]

Hulu, the joint venture between News Corp.’s Fox, GE’s NBC Universal and Disney’s ABC, doesn’t plan on charging people to watch the stuff it’s currently airing on the site–a mix of first-run shows from broadcast TV, a limited number of cable TV shows and a smattering of movies. But Hulu is trying to figure out how to create some kind of premium offering where you’ll pay for stuff that isn’t on the site right now.

This jibes with Carey’s adjacent reassurance that “not all content on Hulu would be behind a pay wall”, which hints at the addition of some kind of subscription or pay-per-view system, that could conceivably leave current offerings untouched. This is a plausible possibility, but far from sure: Kafka’s sources says Hulu doesn’t actually have a plan yet, so anything is possible.

Plan or no plan, telling everyone what they aren’t going to do would do Hulu good — vague threats of fees for “broadcast content” are just terrifying everyone. [AllThingsD]

Here’s the money quote from NewsCorpian Chase Carey, so there’s no confusion:

It’s time to start getting paid for broadcast content online. I think a free model is a very difficult way to capture the value of our content. I think what we need to do is deliver that content to consumers in a way where they will appreciate the value. Hulu concurs with that, it needs to evolve to have a meaningful subscription model as part of its business

An optimist might interpret this as a move toward tiered access, or even the decidedly good addition of paid premium content, like HBO and Showtime. But read carefully:

It’s time to start getting paid for broadcast content online

It doesn’t get any less premium than broadcast content, which is exactly what Carey says we’ll soon be paying for — sometime in 2010, he supposes. This is extra-extra-foreboding next to last week’s statements about a paid Hulu from Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, highlighted by TVBizwire: “That’s not an if,” he said “that’s a when.” It was fun while it lasted, I guess.

On a totally unrelated note, here are some neat articles, for pleasure reading! [Broadcasting Cable via TVBizwire]

Here’s how it’d work: There’d be a new company running digital store where people could buy and manage their magazine subscriptions that would be delivered on “any” device. Supposedly, Time Inc’s gotten Conde Nast (publisher of Wired, Vanity Fair, etc.) and Heart (Popular Mechanics, Esquire, etc.) ramped up about the idea as well, which would launch in 2010.

Great, except that it’s not going to work. As Peter Kafka points out, they have to convince people to sign up for another service — not an easy feat if they’re already tangled up with a Kindle or Apple. Especially if this new service will be just magazines, and not include newspapers. And there’s no way Amazon or Apple will let the publishers tie a separate service into their devices, pissing in their pool. The whole point of the Kindle is that Amazon controls the delivery method, and that’s likely how Apple’s tablet will work — downloading magazines and newspapers and textbooks through iTunes, just like iPhone apps or iTunes music.

Which basically leaves the the publishers with a handful of generic readers they could get their goods on, meaning they’re screwed. At this point it looks like all roads to eReaders people will actually buy to pass through Amazon or soon, Apple. Sorry magazine dudes: Give in, give up or get out. [All Things D]

That’s a shame, because these are names and people that shareholders, rivals, and other companies looking for talent should know.

For example, there’s Microsoft’s Steve Sinofsky, who saved Windows after the Vista debacle. At Apple, there’s Scott Forstall, the guy behind the iPhone’s industry-dominating software. And, at Facebook, there is perhaps the best example of this type of under-the-radar mega-talent: VP of product, Chris Cox.

Chris is a triple threat: An engineer who can build company-defining products, an operator who can recruit and manage good people, and a long-term strategic thinker. He joined Facebook as an engineer in 2005 and helped build the product that is now the site’s backbone — the “News Feed.”

Then, in 2008, after a period in which Facebook lost several key employees and lost out on hiring several high-profile new ones, Mark Zuckerberg asked Chris to shore up Facebook’s human resources division.

Leading that group, Chris focused on defining Facebook’s mission, company values, product values and how Facebook manages people. He turned Facebook from a place that, despite its red-hot hype, failed to land the top talent into one that regularly poaches from places like Yahoo, Google and LinkedIn.

Now, Chris is back on the product side of the company, overseeing the product managers team, the user-experience team, and the design team as VP of Product.

Chris’s ability to innovate Facebook products and lead its people does not go unappreciated at the startup.

“I can’t underscore how much he represents and embodies what this company stands for,” says Facebook spokesboss Brandee Barker.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tells us, “Chris has a ton of energy for product, engineering, and people, and he motivates everyone here at Facebook to work better, think smarter, and pursue the ideas they are passionate about.”

10. Loopt cofounder/CEO Sam Altman
The word you hear over and over about Sam Altman is “will”.

As in, he has it — to succeed, to overcome.

Here’s what he told Charlie Rose when Google introduced Loopt-clone Latitude: “You know, I’m happy to say that there was a lot of talk about Latitude is going to kill Loopt, and it hasn’t even come close to happening yet. I think we have huge respect for Google, but we can out-innovate anybody in the world, I hope, and we’re very focused on this. We’re nimble, we’re quick, and we’ll keep delivering a better product.”

Y Combinator’s Paul Graham puts Altman on the same list of founder he puts Steve Jobs:
Sam is, along with Steve Jobs, the founder I refer to most when I’m advising startups. On questions of design, I ask “What would Steve do?” but on questions of strategy or ambition I ask “What would Sam do?”

What I learned from meeting Sam is that the doctrine of the elect applies to startups. It applies way less than most people think: startup investing does not consist of trying to pick winners the way you might in a horse race. But there are a few people with such force of will that they’re going to get whatever they want.

9. Google CFO Patrick Pichette

Google has always been an unstoppable cash-generating machine. The problem was, for much of its short history, Google was also extremely undisciplined about where it spent all that cash. That changed when Patrick Pichette became CFO last year and promised to “feed the winners”, and “starve the losers”.

Of course, that’s just good business sense. Patrick’s real talent—says a Google insider—is his ability to communicate the need for cost discipline in a way that Google’s academically-minded upper management can buy into.

Says the Insider: “[Patrick] thinks like a normal business person but he has the academic credibility to be taken seriously here. Not aggressive or overbearing, but introducing the kind of discipline good companies all have. He has a slightly academic air and that really plays here.”

8. President of AOL Media Bill Wilson

If new AOL CEO Tim Armstrong turns around AOL, it will be because of AOL Media president Bill Wilson. He oversees 1500 fulltime and freelance editors and writers—an editorial staff larger than the New York Times newsroom—working to turn AOL into the Time Inc. for the 21st Century.

7. Google SVP Jonathan Rosenberg

You use Google’s vast portfolio of products all the time, but do know the name of the top executive behind them?

Here’s a hint: it’s not cofounders Larry Page or Sergey Brin. It’s not the photogenic Marissa Mayer. It’s SVP Jonathan Rosenberg.

Why all the power? Maybe because one of the only people at Google willing to raise his voice.

Valleywag: Google’s Mountain View campus is a happy primary-coloured wonderland where no one ever screams or yells. Except for SVP Jonathan Rosenberg. A Google employee tells us that at the Googleplex Rosenberg is known as “a shitkicker” who “likes to crack the whip”. Google lore has it that Rosenberg likes to yell so much, he even hollered during his hiring interview, presumably with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

People were like what the f–k is going on in that conference room? And then someone was like someone is interviewing, and it’s the interviewee who’s doing the yelling. He just literally likes to yell.

His broken volume dial hasn’t hurt his career: Rosenberg is one of a handful of execs who’s allowed to participate in Google’s quarterly earnings calls with Wall Street.

6. Hulu CTO Eric Feng

Talk about innovating under pressure. Web TV startup Hulu is a News Corp, NBC and Disney joint venture, but don’t be mistaken. There are plenty of powerful TV and film executives at News Corp, NBC and Disney who see Hulu as an existential threat and desperately want it to fail.

Credit Hulu CTO Eric Feng—”responsible for the design and implementation of the Hulu user experience”, according to his company bio—for creating a product users love, thereby depriving those insider skeptics all ammunition.

Here’s that bio:

Eric Feng | Senior Vice President of Audience and CTO
Eric Feng serves as the Chief Technical Officer of Hulu and Senior Vice President of the Audience Business where he is responsible for the design and implementation of the Hulu user experience. Prior to joining Hulu, Eric was the Founder and CEO of Mojiti, LLC an online video annotation service located in Beijing, China. Eric’s past experience also includes several years at Microsoft and Microsoft Research Asia; Tsinghua University in Beijing, China where he served as a visiting professor; and Trilogy Software where he incubated Uberworks.com, an Internet startup later acquired by a public company. Eric graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was awarded the IEC Everitt Award, recognizing the top graduating engineering student.

5. Microsoft president of Windows Steven Sinofsky

Steve Sinofsky is the man who saved Windows for Microsoft.

Following a successful run shipping Microsoft Office products, he took over Windows development in 2006 after multiple delays postponed Vista’s launch.

Soon after, he wrote a memo to CEO Steve Ballmer saying, “We need to decide what we will do and do that well and 100% and not just do a little of everything.”

After getting Windows 7 ready for launch ahead of schedule, he was made president of Microsoft’s Windows division in July.

(Meanwhile, Steve Ballmer should take this advice about the whole company, not just the Windows division).

4. MLB.com CEO Bob Bowman

Bob runs pro baseball’s web operations, which means he runs the most successful online business in professional sports, with annual revenues surpassing half a billion dollars.

He does it pushing his team to innovate its product above and beyond what any other sports league offers every year.

3. Zynga CEO Mark Pincus

Before 2009, the prevailing wisdom was that the Facebook App economy didn’t exist and that US startups would never figure out how to sell virtual goods like they do in Asia.

As CEO fo Zynga, Mark Pincus is proving all that wrong. People say Zynga could cross $US100 million in revenues in 2009. More and more, we’re hearing that’s a conservative estimate.

2. Facebook VP of Product, Chris Cox

Chris is a triple threat — an engineer who can build company-defining products, a operator who can recruit and manage good people, and a long-term strategic thinker. He joined Facebook as engineer in 2005 and helped build the product that is now the site’s backbone — the “News Feed”.

Then, in 2008, after period in which Facebook lost several key employees and lost out on hiring several high-profile new ones, Mark Zuckerberg asked Chris to shore up Facebook’s human resources division.

Leading that group, Chris focused on defining Facebook’s mission, company values, product values and how Facebook manages people. He turned Facebook from a place that, despite its red-hot hype, failed to land the top talent into one that regularly poaches from places like Yahoo, Google and LinkedIn.

Now, Chris is back on the product side of the company, overseeing the product managers team, the user-experience team, and the design team as VP of Product.

Chris’s ability to innovate Facebook products and lead its people does not go unappreciated at the startup.

“I can’t underscore how much he represents and embodies what this company stands for,” says Facebook spokesboss Brandee Barker.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tells us, “Chris has a ton of energy for product, engineering, and people, and he motivates everyone here at Facebook to work better, think smarter, and pursue the ideas they are passionate about.”

1. Apple SVP Scott Forstall

In August, we declared that Apple is the new Microsoft:

Apple is now the wildly profitable owner of the dominant iPod platform and rapidly-becoming dominant iPhone platform, which are really one in the same. Unlike any other competitor in the industry, moreover—including the still PC-centric Microsoft—Apple has managed to link the two big personal computing platforms together, through its software and resurgent Mac business.

As Apple extends its lead as the mobile computing platform of choice—calling the iPhone a “phone” misses the point—Apple’s dominance of this enormous opportunity will increase. This dominance should put Apple in a position to generate an extraordinary share of the value in the this industry over the next decade, just as Microsoft did with desktop computing.

There’s plenty of credit to go around for Apple’s rise to the top, but one name that doesn’t get mentioned enough is Scott Forstall’s, the SVP behind Apple’s iPhone software.

[Lifehacker]

The semi-apology came in the form of an email, in which a Hulu rep told G4 that the move was a compromise:

Everything we do is with an eye toward achieving our long-term goal of maximising the content you can access as conveniently as possible in a way that ‘works’ for the content owner. In the short-term that may require us to make some tough decisions…

Hulu won’t go so far as to directly blame specific companies, but it sounds like one—or a few—of their many partners signaled that PS3 streaming was a threat to their relationship, somehow. But yeah, how? Or, I guess, why?

Distribution availability across platforms — theatres vs. TV vs. recorded media like DVDs vs. online streaming vs. mobile phones — was always implicitly or explicitly controlled in that world… the windowing strategy is still dominant in the business. Billions of dollars flow in across these different windows, and entire companies are organised around them.

This is actually pretty clear cut. Content providers are uncomfortable with the concept of video streaming on the PS3, because the console is typically connected to televisions. This content delivery grey area is enough to somehow screw with, or simply muddy, their licensing arrangements or corporate structure, so they’re exercising caution.

As frustrating as that is, it’s also a bit reassuring; far from a sign of a concert rollback of digital streaming rights, this is just a minor hiccup during a long, still-advancing transition. As Señor Hulu said, upstarts like Hulu need to be sensitive to media companies’ old-fashioned sensibilities in order to change them. [G4]