Skatter Tech recently got access to Hulu, a new service launched by News Corporation and NBC Universal, which offers streaming access to high quality TV Shows and short videos. When we say TV Shows, we don’t mean random content, we mean real actual prime time shows that you would watch on TV such as The Office, Heroes, The Simpsons, House, Chuck, Prison Break, and 24. Even talk shows and comedy sketches including Saturday Night Live (SNL), Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno are available through Hulu. The premium content will be distributed by streaming the video directly to your browser using flash player, so no additional plugins or software is needed. The player is quite advance and allows pausing, forwarding/rewinding, controlling volume, and even watching in full screen. And even when I played an episode of Scrubs in full screen, although the frame rate was a bit low, it was still much better than any other service I have seen to date. Viewers will have the ability to email the show to friends or embed them onto their own blogs and web pages.

So how much does this all cost? Absolutely nothing! Unfortunately the service is in beta and access is limited to testers, but should be opened to the public soon. We’ve included a embedded a full video of the latest episode of Heroes for your entertainment. In general, new shows will become available on Hulu once it has been broadcasted on television throughout the United States. (So, after it airs in Hawaii.) TV shows are automatically purged after approximately five weeks or five new episodes of that series has been added to collection. The content will obviously not be available for an infinite amount of time since studios will obviously loose revenue from DVD sales. Despite this, you now have free, legal, and high quality access to all your favorite TV shows.

This is probably one of the smartest moves production studios have made in a while. Instead of wasting time suing those who distribute or download copyrighted content illegally through P2P Networks or BitTorrent, they have decided to offer the shows themselves. The studios finally realized that if people are always going to find a way to get their content without paying for it, why not at least give it to them in high quality for free. News Corp. and NBC has done by launching Hulu. With this new service, studios are hoping to deter people from downloading their content illegally. The studios will also retain profits since advertisements are embedded into their content. So yes, you’ll have to watch ads. Fortunately they weren’t too bad, there were usually three to four 15-second ads for an hour-long show. Either way, this is a “win win” situation for both consumers and studios, since we get to watch shows for free and that they keep their content locked up in a secure player with ads to retain revenue. As of now, TV Shows will come from 15 different studios including FOX, NBC, Bravo, E! Entertainment, FX, SiFi Network, and USA Networks. (See the PDF for a full list of shows and networks.) Hopefully more networks will join this venture soon.

Links: Hulu.com | About Hulu
Attached Files: Hulu Program Guide (.pdf)

P.S. I sadly don’t have any invites to give away, but go ahead and try signing up anyways. You might get lucky! And as promised, here’s the entire latest episode of Heroes – “Cautionary Tales” (S02E09):

Russell Peters, an Canadian-Indian comedian who’s segments have circulated around the web for over a year, has finally landed himself a standup comedy “movie” on Comedy Central. Skatter Tech has been hosting both his Canadian “Comedy Now” show and his New York performance for over a year. Anyways his new movie will air on Comedy Central on August 26, 2006 at 11:00pm (pacific) check your local listings for the channel and exact timings. Also note that “Russell Peters: Outsourced” will be available on DVD and Audio CD on August 29, 2006. You can either pre-order it from Amazon or wait until it reaches stores.

Update: See Video ‘Outsourced’ Here!
Buy It Now: Outsourced DVD ($11.99)

Links: RussellPeters.com | Yahoo TV (info)
Related: Comedy Now Segment | New York Segment

[Video Removed]

The newly aired “Russell Peters: Outsourced” video, which recently aired on Comedy Central has unfortunately been requested to be removed from Skatter Tech and YouTube by Warner Brothers and CMI Management Services. We don’t really want to get stuck with lawsuits, so we have had to remove the content. Comedy Central doesn’t seem to be airing “Outsourced” anytime soon, so if you want to catch his segment you’ll either have to purchase the DVD from Amazon.com or get a hold of it elsewhere. Sorry for the inconvenience!

1) Google Calendar screenshots have been revealed by TechCrunch, a popular Web 2.0 blog. (Yahoo! apparently fed them the info) Anyways “to be launched” service is an online AJAX based calendar service, which is suppose to be called CL2. The service has a gmail-like user interface and will have plenty of colaboration features, including RSS. It should also become intergrated with many of Google’s other services.
Links: Tech Crunch | CL2 Login Screen

2) Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report have been added to the iTunes Store. The “season pass” will cost only $9.99 and will download the current episode plus the next 16 shows when they become available. Epsiodes can still be purchased individually for $1.99.
Links: Daily Show | Colbert Report
iTunes Links: Daily Show | Colbert Report

3) Microsoft has announced that their code name “Origami” Tablet PC should be available by the end of April. This is a new line of products, influenced by Microsoft, which are ultra-portable machines that are powered by Windows XP. Samsung’s version has a 7″ touch screen display, an extendable keyboard, Bluetooth, and WiFi. They can also run standard apps such as MS Office as wells as support playing videos, listening to music, and viewing photos. (Pricing will be around $600-1000)
Links: Origami Project | Microsoft’s Preview

4) MSN Live (aka. Windows Live) has just gotten a full AJAX makeover. Although still in beta, the service looks simple and clean. It has support for custom RSS feeds, as well as a selection to choose from. (weather, horoscope, email, news, etc.) The interface looks much better than Google IG. One neat feature that other services don’t offer that MSN Live does is Feed Search. For example search for “CNN” and when the results appear, if a feed is available a “add feed” button will be displayed.
Links: Windows Live | LiveCom Offical Blog

There have been many Russell Peters Videos circulating around the web for over an year now. The most famous of his stand-ups was his ~45 minute show in Canada on Comedy Now! (that can be downloaded from this site as well) Russell Peters is an Indian Comedian, who has many great jokes about the Indian culture as well as makes plenty of hillarious insults at other ethinic groups. He has also appeared in the Wild 94.9 Comdey Jam at the Shoreline Amphitheatere (Mountain View, CA), along with Carlos Mencia, DL Hughley, and many more. (over 20,000 people showed up to this event, which was also a Hurricane Katrina benfit show) Anyways, the video is 58 minutes long and is composed of many new jokes. Although it is not as great as his other performances, it is still worth the watch.

Note: This video is way to large and would cost a large amount of money to pay for bandwith. Therefore the video is currently being hosted by “Google Video” and thanks to Google you can stream the video at up to 200kbps. The video will play in you browser through Google Video as long as you have both Macromedia Flash and Java Runtime installed. If you would like to download a copy, just click [download] on the Google Video page on the right side. PC, Mac, Sony PSP, and Apple iPod Video formats are available!

Link: NEW – Russell Peters in NY via Google Video
Related: Original 45-Min Russell Peters Video (.rm – realplayer required)

Update: “Russell Peters: Outsourced” Now Available

Update: (11/28/05) There are now over 2,500 downloads in total of both the New York and Canada episodes every day. Many are ending up here from either Google or Yahoo’s search engines, searching for keywords such as “Russell Peters Full Video Download,” “Russell Peters full-length show,” “Russell Peters Complete,” “Russell Peters 45-Minunte Video,” “Russell Peters Torrent” and “Indian Russell Peters Comdian.” Please also check out the New York Video!

UPDATE: (08/25/06) NEW ‘Russell Peters: Outsourced’ VIDEO