Look out, TV is moving online

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Jessica Torrez-Riley, a 20-year-old Northeastern University student, never thought of herself as a big television viewer — until she discovered how much TV she could watch without a TV. There were the episodes of Lost that she could catch the next day on ABC.com. And the old episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that she watches on Hulu.com, a new streaming-video site, launched by Fox and NBC, that puts at her fingertips a remarkable bounty of programming.

“In high school, I would watch TV at night but I never really was invested in a show because I couldn’t be consistent with it,” she said. “I never really got invested in TV shows until I got my first laptop.”

Now, if she chooses, she can get invested in far more than the current Fox and NBC fare that makes up much of Hulu’s online library, which opened to the public this month. There are also Woody Woodpecker cartoons, clips from the 1990s sketch show In Living Color, and 37 episodes of Starsky & Hutch. They’re all available for free, supported by unskippable ads — as are dozens of movies, from The Big Lebowski to Sideways. And in a nod to the tech-savvy users that make up Hulu’s early audience, an entire Hulu show can be embedded in a blog.

“Hulu stands out because it’s such an elegantly presented version and it provides so much efficiency,” said James McQuivey, who studies TV as a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research.

While it’s now another fledgling site with limited name recognition, Hulu has the potential to be much more: the most addictive time-killer since instant-messaging, the biggest thing to hit TV since the digital video recorder, the next big step toward the day when TV and the Internet are one.

Hyperbole? Maybe a little. But TV-industry watchers say Hulu and other sites that stream shows represent a step toward the inevitable convergence of the Internet and TV. Within a year or so, more TVs will come with jacks for Ethernet cords, McQuivey said, allowing an Internet signal to stream directly into the set. More viewers will realise they can use their TVs as monitors. And more people will begin to plug in laptops, fire up a site like Hulu, and watch episodes of the early-’90s sitcom Doogie Howser, MD on a 56-inch screen, or watch current network shows whenever they want.