Watching online TV is all well and good except for those annoying ad breaks. Well the online tv networks have identified this as a problem and are resolving it.

How you ask? Well through a variety of innovative measures such as user ratings for the ads, choose your own commercial options before the show begins and even interactive gameplay during ad breaks.

Well know trailblazing website Hulu which celebrated its first year anniversary on Wednesday is leading the way in user friendly advertising.

Instead of boring ad breaks suffered by standard TV viewers, they show only one commercial in each break. Testing has shown that the less ads there are makes the ones shown more memorable. This allows Hulu to charge higher prices for the ads that are shown.

“The notion that less is more is absolutely playing out on Hulu,” said Jason Kilar, the chief executive. “This is benefiting advertisers as much as it is benefiting users.”

Hulu, while not the first TV and movie streaming website dominates the ad supported free TV and movie streaming concept in the US. Having started with only 10 advertisers, it has grown to a network of 100 plus from household names such as General Motors and Old Spice.

Their service is only available in the United States due to copyright issues, but has grown in size supplying 142 million streams to 6.3 million unique viewers in September. It has grown to become the sixth most popular online video brand overtaking MTV, Disney and ESPN. Still to catch up with the big boys such as Youtube, Yahoo, MSN and Nickelodeon.

With a library of more than 1,000 television series and 400 feature-length films, Hulu attracts a wider audience than individual network Web sites or competitors like Veoh and Joost. Recently, the site’s biggest hurdle has been a shortage of advertising amid a sudden increase in video viewing.

The website which is a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. is still not making profits but has won many admirers.

Greg Smith of Ogilvy Group now uses the site regularly, he said:- ‘I have been waiting for this for 10 years, Hulu takes TV content, which is the best long form video content there is – the Web has yet to come up with something as good – and it just breaks it out of the tyranny of the schedule.”

The fewer ads approach is evident when looking at popular half hour long comedies such as Family Guy or The Office. They have an average of eight minutes of ad time on standard American TV, where as on Hulu each show has on average only two minutes of ad time.

So less ads and viewable on demand! Online TV is getting more desireable by the day.

worldtvpc.com

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