Hulu Joins YouTube’s 1 Billion Views Club

By Megan O'Neill at SocialTimes:  
A new member has just been inducted into YouTube’s 1 billion views club and the channel may come as somewhat of a surprise to some—it’s Hulu!  That’s right, the 37th channel to cross the 1 billion views mark on YouTube is another video streaming site.

Hulu has been posting videos to the huluDotcom YouTube channel since 2008.  The channel is currently home to 175 videos, including Hulu Superbowl commercials, teasers from original Hulu shows, clips from The Simpsons, Family Guy and more.  The Hulu content on YouTube doesn’t serve as a replacement for the content on Hulu, but rather as enticement for viewers to head over to Hulu to watch more.
The Hulu YouTube channel currently stands at 1,021,566,481 views with 322,981 subscribers.  It clocks in at 37 on the list of YouTube’s most-viewed channels and is closely followed by The Ellen Show’s channel, which is just shy of 1 billion at 988 million views.  Ellen is expected to join the 1 Billion Views club any day now.
To celebrate Hulu’s YouTube success, please enjoy this delightful Family Guy clip, care of the Hulu YouTube channel!

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Apple to make a bid for Hulu?

A couple of days ago we mentioned the UltraViolet cloud service which was basically like iTunes, except for movies and videos. It seemed like a pretty good idea as it would allow users to access their movies in the digital format on a variety of devices, all at one price.
Now it seems that there are rumors of Apple being in talks with Hulu to acquire the company and to provide five years of programming to the US networks and two years of exclusive rights to shows from Disney, News Corp and NBC Universal. Essentially if this deal goes through, it could very well be Apple’s answer to the iCloud for video.

This is probably in conjunction with the rumors that Apple had an iCloud video service in the works, along with the reports that Hulu has plans to sell the company. It seems that Apple is not the only interested buyer as other companies listed among the other bidders include Yahoo, Google, AT&T and etc. At one point it even included Microsoft but apparently the company has dropped out of the bidding.