Hulu's true purpose revealed
Today Comcast announced its bid to port its video-on-demand business to the Internet. The plan, audaciously named Project Infinity, can most immediately be seen at Fancast.com, a site for free streaming video. But what the move mostly highlights isn't Comcast's ambitions but the strategy of its partners — CBS and Hulu, the NBC/News Corp. joint venture. CBS has said it would rather distribute its video widely across the Web than labor to lure viewers to CBS.com. Hulu, likewise, is not really a destination site like Google's YouTube; its a video-syndication arm. Nothing illustrates this better than Comcast's Fancast, where every NBC and Fox video is Hulu-branded.